The entire nation has known for YEARS that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is bad news. He is one of those people you think of when you look up the word in the dictionary. He’s that bad.
What is the puzzlement is that it has taken so long for the people of Texas to DO SOMETHING about this guy. Now I’m not privy to the internal workings of Texas politics, nor do I want to be, thank you very much. Georgia has plenty of its own and I am not going to throw sticks and stones at their state government when my own is built of glass and I know it. (That’s one of the reasons that I am seeking a seat in the Senate. There would be one more person up there that could not be corrupted. I don’t have family that could benefit from my being in office. They all live out of state.)
On May 25, 2023, the investigative committee voted to send 20 Articles of Impeachment to the floor for a vote. TWENTY! That’s 5x the number that Trump was impeached with! They include including bribery, unfitness for office and abuse of public trust. If the Texas House goes through with the impeachment vote, he could be forced from office immediately. The day isn’t over in TX as I write this.
If only they would hold their Governor accountable for the cruelties, violations of Civil Liberties and Constitutional Rights, and incredible terminable stupidities, racism, and bigotries, we’d have something. Unfortunately, they won’t.
Every thinking person in America should be on the phone and on their websites/emails telling these people what we think about this balderdash of nonsense about the debt ceiling RIGHT NOW.
You might have to find their House.gov website in order to email them. I did for mine. (Oh, you bet I told him, even though I know full well it will go right in the trash can, but at least I had my say.)
Just a few reminders of the reasons why you need to do this urgently:
Military paychecks and benefit checks to their families if they are deployed will be delayed. How many times have you heard them say, “I back our military all the way!” That boils down to a burnt pan, folks, because they DON’T. If they did, we wouldn’t be here.
Veterans’ benefits would be slashed by up to a third. You really should have noticed by now that when those people say they “back the military”, that what they really mean is that they back the contractors and military industrial complex that they own stock in. Oh, yeah, make them more money. But take care of our people when they come home? Nyah. They’re just an expense we don’t need-at least to them. I feel differently, don’t you?
Social Security checks and benefits not coming. For those of us who depend on these checks to pay bills, this is MAJOR. This is not just senior citizens, but also people on disability and children who have lost their parents and need support money. SSID checks are a lifeline to MILLIONS. MAGA GOP goons want us to “work” for what we have ALREADY EARNED?? And many of us CANNOT work anymore or never could work. Can you say wealthy white privilege?
Slashing SNAP and other nutritional programs among others. Oh, please. We are a country that already has food rotting in the fields because we have too much of it. Yet we have hungry children, babies, and elderly who can’t get enough to eat in food deserts because the PRICE is out of control. Just how cruel and out of touch can these people possibly get?
These are just a few of the programs that Majorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Louie Gomer, Kevin McCarthy, and about 120 of their “friends” have come up with as a solution to our debt. The irony is that even IF we totally eliminated every one of these programs, it would not change the debt by more than $1 trillion. Apparently, math was a subject that every last one of them flunked in school.
I’ve never seen so many math impaired people in one place in my life.
The horrendous thing? If this country does default, it throws the WORLD’S economy into chaos. Now that scares the living _____ out of me. But those morons either don’t believe it or don’t care. I don’t know which.
What I do know? We need to get people that damned ignorant of how our economy and our government works OUT OF OFFICE next year.
In the meantime, deluge everyone up there with phone calls and emails. We have to do everything we can.
For those of us who are learning the rather peculiar language used in government (especially in Congress and in law), I thought that perhaps some explanation would be good to have. Even if you have “heard of it” before, a refresher can be good for you. My father tried to teach us this stuff, but we were kids at the time and our eyes tended to glaze over after a while. Don’t get me wrong. Both of us enjoyed learning about law and my sibling even has an Ivy League degree in it. We just had other interests, too.
The “discharge petition” is a method (not a piece of paper, although there will be documentation of the event) by which members of a committee or caucus can get their measure past the gatekeepers and out to the next stage of the process for a vote. It DOES require a majority of the votes of the members of whatever group you are talking about to force the issue. Since the Democrats are in the minority, of course, that they MUST convince at least some of the Republican members to vote with them. This means that some members of the Republican side suddenly cannot eat, walk, work, or (presumably) do anything without their new BFFs. They’re getting calls from the White House, the Cabinet, lobbyists, their side, and the Democrats morning, noon, and night. Until this is decided, the pressure will only mount.
These things ARE NOT tried very often, and even when they are, they have a low success rate. That’s only about a 10% success rate. There’s a reason that politicians don’t like to try to use them. Politicians want to be seen as winners and they would prefer that image to be 100% of the time if possible, but that’s not going to happen. This kind of success rate? Ummm, no. If you know you are not going to be running again, then you can risk it, but most of those folks and certainly Joe Biden ARE running to retain their seats so it is a problem that they would rather not have.
BUT
This case is different. If the economy should go into default, there will be finger-pointing every which way. The Republicans will seek to blame Biden, the Democrats will blame McCarthy and the Insurrection Caucus, the Berniecrats will point in both directions at the same time, while the Greens will hold hands and have a collective meltdown. The entire WORLD is holding its breath, for the love of all that’s holy, and MTG, Gaetz, and their little club wants to play a childish game of white line chicken?? (Will no one arrest them and put them in prison with the rest of the Jan 6 traitors so they can harmonize right along with the choir? Unbelievable.) If our country defaults, the rest of the world will go ‘pop’ as well, and then we’ll all be in a “mell of a hess”. But maybe they are figuring they’ll make a fortune on it? Who knows?
We cannot assume that “saner heads will prevail” in this or anything else now. We have literal CHILDREN running portions of our government. They are emotional CHILDREN. Trump has tantrums. He throws his ketchup loaded food at the walls. He craps in his pants. He has to be reassured every single day that he is the best ever. That’s a CHILD. McConnell sulls up and won’t do anything unless he can have his way. That’s childish. McCarthy is being childish with his demands. Boebert, Gaetz, and Greene scream from the House floor like children at the President, then complain that they feel intimidated by the mere presence of a black man. Give me a break. Such butterflies. They’re showing their emotional maturity to be about that of a five year old.
I guess the discharge petition has to be tried unless we can find people with some modicum of maturity on the other side of the aisle. I don’t know them well enough to recommend where to look. The prospects look pretty bleak to me.
Words, and in law, punctuation and its placement, matter. In fact, both of them matter a LOT. That is why I am concerned about exactly how the General Assembly, Governor Kemp, the courts, and, ultimately, the law enforcement community is going to define and implementSB 44once it goes into effect. That happens on July 1, 2023.
In O.C.G.A. Title 16 Section 16-15-4(e), it says “It shall be unlawful for any person to directly, or through another acting upon such person’s direction, cause, encourage, solicit, recruit, or coerce another to become a member of the or associate of a criminal street gang, to participate in a criminal street gang, or to conduct or participate in criminal gang activity.” That’s interesting. Because the bill itself doesn’t tell you a definition of just what a “gang” or “criminal street gang” is.
Being the type to wonder just why this bill was needed in the first place, I looked at it more closely and saw that it is meant to clarify and amend the language of a previous statute. Okay, that’s fine, but what did that one say and what was the definition of “gang” in it?
In Section 16-15-3(2) Definitions, I found this (2) “Criminal street gang” means any organization, association, or group of three or more persons associated in fact, whether formal or informal, which engages in criminal gang activity as defined in paragraph (1) of this Code section. The existence of such organization, association, or group of individuals associated in fact may be established by evidence of a common name or common identifying signs, symbols, tattoos, graffiti, or attire or other distinguishing characteristics, including, but not limited to, common activities, customs, or behaviors. Such term shall not include three or more persons, associated in fact, whether formal or informal, who are not engaged in criminal gang activity.” It’s still somewhat of a judgement call for the law officers who might be doing their job, but that would be the argument for the defense attorney/public defender in court. (Assuming you actually get to arraignment/bond hearing in the first place. I’ve seen guys arrested who sat in jail for over a year just waiting on this. Not charged with anything. Just sitting in jail on the taxpayers’ dime waiting for their turn in front of a judge. Please note: I’m in the part of JUVENILE court that puts kids in foster care because parents are in jail and can’t work to support them. WTH?)
Understand me now, I know there are criminal street gangs and I know they are a serious problem. The people in them are not to be trifled with. I’m just concerned about very low-level teens and young adults who have children, might be doing some ill-advised things, hanging out on a hot summer night on a porch or in the street, and they mouth off at a cruiser. Or maybe they just see the car and decide to scatter. Who knows why. But the person with the badge sees a hoodie or sagging pants and decides what was seen was ‘gang activity’. How does that officer know that?
I know what the LE community will say. I also know what the poor and/or Black community will say. Each will be biased towards their own. I want the CORRECT thing to be done. This is dangerous stuff for everybody concerned.
If you want to read the bill, the link is here. Underlined stuff is the new language. The words that are strikethrough are being taken out. The Georgia Code for Gang Crime can be found on this website. Remember that the wording is what is CURRENTLY in effect and will be changed on July 1, 2023.
I love the law because it is the way society keeps itself orderly. But it can also be used to suppress and oppress in the wrong hands. Law is merely a tool and it can be used for good or evil. It pays to watch how it is made and implemented in the highest seats of power. That’s why I want to be part of the process. Some of our laws are being used to oppress. Those need to be either changed or eliminated. Others need to be strengthened.
Help me get to the State Senate to work to change what needs to be changed. I want to help make certain that you are protected, enabled, and liberated to live full and free lives in Georgia.
I get it. I do. If you want to get angry, get angry at the Republicans in power. They wanted to MAKE IT A DAMNED NUISANCE in hopes that fewer people would go to the polls. Historically, when fewer people go to the polls, their people generally win. It’s a form of voter suppression. They will try EVERY cheating method they can find.
One of the things that I would like to propose to you as a means of combatting this nonsense is ADDING the concept of what is called “ranked choice” voting. Let me explain how it works. (Other places are already using it and they really like it.)
Let’s say we have a slate of candidates for Mayor of Some City.
Robert Bowie -Republican
Sandra Smith-Democrat
Nakita Hines Jones – Green
Harriet Jordan – independent
Scott Wright – Socialist Democrat
Bruce Tallman – Nationalist
Bubba Plowman- Peoples
Trevor Galbraith – Libertarian
The way this works is that you, as the voter, would be asked to take the entire slate of candidates and RANK them in order 1-8 that you would want to see them elected to that particular office.
Let’s say that all the votes come back in. I’ll make this fairly simple for clarity.
Sandra Smith – Democrat gets 10 first place votes, 6 second place votes, 2 thirds
Robert Bowie – Republican 9 first place, 5 second, 4 third
Nakita Hines Jones – Green O first 0 second 8 third
Harriet Jordan – Independent 2 first 2 second 2 third
the rest of the ticket didn’t get any votes at all
The candidate that got the MOST #1 votes running against the entire ballot was Sandra Smith, Democrat. That would mean that she won the seat.
If she and the next person had gotten the same number of #1 votes, the Elections people would have looked at the number of #2 votes and decided on the basis of that. In this case, she still would have won the seat. It would have been decided right then with NO RUN0FF.
This very rapidly eliminates those candidates who get the lowest scores (4-8). The ones that get the top three scores are then evaluated for the one that gets the MOST #1 scores. This is the method that eliminated Sarah Palin from the candidate pool for Congress not once but twice from Alaska this year. This resulted in the election of the FIRST Native American (Mary Peltola) from that state and from those nations to Congress.
This change would pretty much ELIMINATE the need for run-off voting entirely. This would not only #1. speed up the election process in general, but also #2. save money from having to run the extra elections. That is just the taxpayer money. It also saves the time, effort and money of the candidates and donors who have to fork out to run for office.
FYI-DEMOCRATS sponsored the legislation to put dropboxes in every advance voting location. It was the REPUBLICANS who mandated that they be brought INSIDE the Elections offices so they would be inaccessible after the office was closed for the day (usually after 5:00 pm) instead of the previous time of 7:00 pm. This meant that people driving home from work could no longer have access to the boxes on their way home from work. More voter suppression at work here.
My solution? Put the boxes in fire stations or sheriffs’ offices. Those places are manned 24/7, they are ALWAYS lighted with parking, it would be a fairly simple matter to put up surveillance cameras on the boxes (heck, hunting cameras are only about $100/each), and just have elections employees empty them on a regular basis. That would make the boxes available to the public 24/7 which is what we REALLY NEED for people who work double shifts, odd hours, or jobs like LD OTR truckers who never know when they are getting in. Why do Republicans want to DUMP this BS on honest people? Put the boxes out where they are accessible and allow people to vote!!
What’s with this “extra” business of proving who you are on the absentee ballot application AND the ballot itself stuff anyway? Good Lord. The things are BARCODED. That alone ensures that there is only ONE assigned to any particular individual. You are unique. Nobody else can create another ballot and vote in your name without setting off alarm bells all over creation. So just how does this requirement help with the rampant paranoia running around this state? It doesn’t. Pardon my choice of words, but it’s asinine. (I do apologize to the ass family. They’re much smarter than this.)
I have two reasons for being put out about this really. I’ve already talked about the sheer profound obtuse stupidity of it, but the other thing is that they waste the taxpayers’ money doing this when there are REAL things that need to be addressed. I’m talking about things such as:
Our abysmal public system that has sunk to the bottom of the national rankings and is going lower. But what does Brian Kemp say about it? “Our schools are better than ever.” Give me a break. All anyone has to do is a simple Google search to see the national rankings to see that we rank 36th/50. (If you want a schoolhouse score, that would be 28/100. That’s a miserable score. But if you ask him, he’ll tell you that they scored better than last year. You know why? Because the School Super compares Georgia schools to Georgia schools-not to the NATIONAL standards. BTW, they stopped doing that under Perdue because they were cutting the budgets so much that the quality was sinking faster than the Titanic’s anchor.
We need JOBS that are out in the rural areas of our counties. These big box businesses like Amazon, KIA, Kellogg, and Remington are fantastic for the cities, but they pull workers out of our rural areas. We need body shops, hair salons, daycares, grocery stores, convenience stores, restaurants (not just fast food), and hardware stores in our rural small towns. What are they doing to help rural Georgia?
Housing that REAL people can afford. I’m talking about people who can’t afford the mortgages on these $300-400k behemoths the developers are putting up. Where are the grocery store clerks supposed to lay their heads? I’m talking about the couple who got married straight out of high school with a baby on the way. Their income is maybe $25K/year. What are they supposed to afford? They can’t afford the rent AND the daycare these days. What are our General Assembly people doing about that?
There’s more, but I’m tired of them yapping about election fraud when the Secretary of State’s office proved conclusively in 2022 that there WASN’T ANY. I want them to stop wasting time and money and get to work doing something USEFUL.
That’s why I want to be your State Senator. I want to get up there and get REAL work done instead of farting around and trying to look important. You need somebody who will listen to you and work to fix your real problems. I am that person. Tell your friends and neighbors. Spread the word.
Ask me to come speak to your group. All I ask is that you help pay for my gas.
If you are old enough, you will remember this photograph appearing in LIFE magazine. The majority of you will not. That is John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was still a Senator at the time, campaigning for the Presidency in rural West Virginia. This was a man who was born into great wealth just like Donald Trump. He was raised very differently, however. He, and his brothers, were raised by Rose Kennedy to be strict Catholics, and as such to be mindful of their duties to give back to their communities and to their country. Like Trump, the money came from questionable sources. Joe Kennedy was a bootlegger during Prohibition. To make the kind of money he did meant that he was also in with organized crime bosses to truck the stuff into the cities to sell. There has always been speculation about the exact nature of the businesses of those “speak-easies”. Prohibition did not last long, but Joe Kennedy had made a fortune. Rose made sure the money stayed around.
Democrats back in the 1950-60s knew they needed the rural vote. In fact, when JFK won the Presidency, he won by only 120,000 of the 70 million votes cast in that election. (Nixon was his opponent.) He campaigned HARD in the rural areas across the country. Then somewhere along the way, the campaign managers thought it would be time, and probably money, better spent if most of the campaigning was spent mostly in the larger cities and, even then, in the “swing” states, and in doing so, took the candidates even further from the rural voters.
Georgia has only recently reacquired the status of being a “swing state”. I’m not knocking it. Not by a long shot, folks, because it means more attention from the national party and national media. That’s never a bad thing. That also brings in more money which, hopefully, will make its way down to the state legislature level. The question from me is, how much attention and money will be given to the RURAL counties and voters/issues that so desperately need it ? Democrats have neglected this for far too long and they’ve paid dearly for it. That’s why the rural voters felt abandoned and went to the Republicans. (Not that it did them a speck of good, because all they got was a lot of lip service and no action like a bunch of seedy used car salesmen moonlighting as preachers on Sunday mornings.)
You know I’m right. That’s why I want to build a team of volunteers who are willing to go knock on doors, phone calls, write postcards, or text these people and get them into a dialogue about what kind of concerns they have. I want people who can ask questions and then wait for a response. That’s right-stand there and say nothing. Let them talk. These people think they haven’t been heard. So listen to them. Repeat what they say back to them to get it right. Then come back and let’s talk.
For the love of all that’s holy, these two are really out of control. This last dissent of Sam Alito’s really proves that statement. In it, he rakes the other conservative justices, but particularly Amy Coney-Barrett over the coals for not backing him and Thomas on the abortion drug stay. Well, ex-cuuuuuse me! I am rather certain that she has a brain of her own and the ability to use it. Just because I don’t happen to agree with her (or him) the vast majority of the time is not the issue here. The point is that this man is being patriarchal and patronizing towards her just because she disagreed with him [gasp] in PUBLIC.
It is well-known that she, Alito, and presumably Thomas, all adhere to the religious notion that men are the head of the family, the wife is submissive, the children should be disciplined physically, etc. Most of these sects (or cults depending on your point of view) carry this view into the workplace. I personally find that pretty awkward since a woman is not ‘married’ to a boss or colleague and it really gets strange if she has male subordinates. Somehow, they manage to do it. It appears that perhaps Sam Alito has in some measure.
If that is the case, then his sense of superiority, and possibly even manhood, would have been outraged by her audacity to vote with the majority. He sounds like a wounded buffalo bull writing in his dissent. It is personal and rude. What is most notable is the LACK of legal argument or logic for his dissent. He is just angry at being betrayed and he names names. Then he follows up with “but you’ll see when we have the hearing next year on this and then you’re gonna be sorry.” Seriously, Sam Alito? And here we were thinking you were a grown man. Wow. So either he is showing us who he and Thomas really are, or he’s already into senile dementia and reverting to being a five-year-old playground terror. Either way, do we really need someone with that kind of emotional immaturity on that high judicial bench?
Right now, I am planning on running for State Senate D29 in 2024. My campaign account at ActBlue is open if you want to donate to help me prepare for action. It is completely safe to use. I recommend small monthly donations. It’s less painful that way. $10 regularly would really help. If you can do more, that’s wonderful. Of course, one-time gifts are always appreciated.
If you need a speaker for your group, let me know. I do need gas money. You can do that with a small gift card or by passing the hat. Your choice.
My father-in-law, may he play many rounds of golf in heaven, used to say, “You know what really burns my a$$? A little grass fire about this high.” Well, all these wealthy (some of them filthy, stinky wealthy) people in Washington who plotted sedition against me and my country have burned my a$$ and how. Let me enumerate the ways and their methods. And no, I’m not listening to the “both sides do it” mantra because both sides DO NOT DO IT. I’m not saying there’s isn’t some under-the-table stuff going on on our side. I know good and well there is. Chicago and Maryland are notorious for it. But there’s a lot less and, let me tell you something, we don’t tolerate the things in our ranks that they do in theirs. We just don’t. So here we go.
Blatant racism-and by this, I’m talking about discrimination based on skin color, country of origin, or ethnic heritage. This has gotten so out of hand that it can be done by members of that SAME GROUP (E.G. Tyree Nickels). That’s some hard-core brainwashing there.
Sexual predation of all kinds-raping of men, women, children, animals. Human trafficking. They laugh about it and elect/re-elect their members to the highest offices in the land and put them on the highest court in the land. Democrats get a whiff of something like that and force their members out of office. What a contrast.
Thieves–Oh, they preach big about the budget, but don’t ask them to give up their federal subsidies, PPP loans (that get forgiven completely), or insider trading information that they profit extremely handsomely on. Dishonest? Oh, yeah. Extremely. They rip off the American taxpayers to the tune of $BILLIONS every year. I’m talking about them and their families. Every last one of them rakes in hundreds of thousands of dollars in various ways and you can just hear the cash register going ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. Why doesn’t somebody pass a law to stop this? Honey, these are the people who would be passing that law. You think they’re going to wring that golden goose’s neck?
Patriarchal In Nature (and that’s bad for women and children)–Supposedly, this is because of the “Judeo-Christian” teachings about how the family structure should operate. This is a pile of camel dung taller than Mount Sinai at least. Neither the Talmud (Jewish), New Testament (Christian), nor the Quran (Islam) teaches the kind of subjugation, abuse, and, frankly, torture that they espouse. What they do preach is nothing else than the Christian/fascist/secular version of the Taliban’s Sharia law. They just don’t call it that. It’s just as repressive and horrible. No society that has used this type of repression on its’ women and children has survived for very long. You just cannot treat the very people upon whom the future of your society quite literally rests like that and expect to march into the future. If you do, you might as well cut your own genitals off. If that’s offensive to your tender feelings, so be it. My feelings are really offended by what they do, so I guess we’re even on that score.
Sedition and treason — For the love of all that’s truly patriotic and holy, do not, DO NOT, tell me that people who blatantly call for states to secede from the Union, talk about not paying their fair share of the tax bills, steal from tax payers as a routine thing, tell falsehoods like they breathe, plot on overthrowing our government, get foreign governments to interfere with our elections (“Russia, if you are listening…”), accept outright bribery from foreign agents, cooperate with foreign governments, PROFIT from foreign governments WHILE IN OFFICE, rip off our government as a matter of course because, hey, why not, and then deny that elections were fairly done, are anything BUT SEDITIOUS AND TREASONOUS BASTARDS. Oh, and while most of that is about Trump himself, it is not exclusively about him. There are about 150 Congressional people included in that along with their families and staff, plus some judicial people, attorneys, and some outsiders. I believe the FBI estimates that the count may go as high as 500 or more before the investigation is completed. I want the entire lot of them brought to court, charged, tried, and punished. If we send all the people home from prison who are there on bogus marijuana charges, there’ll be room. That is not a problem.
As far as the “sent by God, second coming of the Christ, the Messiah, the Chosen One, etc.”, I have NEWS for those folks. You need to go back and read the prophecy again FOR YOURSELVES. Oh, I know-Old John wrote a very vague and very confusing bunch of stuff. I sat through many Sunday night sermons on that Book in my growing up years. I’m still convinced somebody was spiking his groceries with some ‘medicinal’ mushrooms. The imagery is florid and, at times, incoherent. Where he DOES write coherently, the passages outline events that are supposed to happen concurrently with the arrival of Messiah. NONE of them did with Trump. Whether you accept all, some, or absolutely none of the writings of John is your choice, not mine. That is your First Amendment Right and I’m not getting into it. I’m just informing you that you were lied to.
The “Republican” candidates coming forward now are no better than him and may, in fact, be worse. As a member of the Democratic Party, I strongly urge you to vet all candidates from either side closely. What they say might sound wonderful. I will promise you that I will tell you what I know. I might be blunt. (My mother tried hard to teach me to be tactful, but I’m afraid I didn’t learn so well.) I hate liars. I make mistakes. When I do, I’ll admit them and try to make amends. Sometimes that’s painful and I’ll admit that, too. Progress can be that way. The fastest was to learn is to make a mistake and learn than to sit still and not make any changes at all. That way lies certain stagnation and death.
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If you are reading this, you will probably remember the uproar about the “Religious Freedom Act” that would have allowed people and businesses around the state to discriminate based on their “profoundly and deeply held religious beliefs”. Well, it’s back. SB 180. Same name, too. Randy Robertson D-29 signed on as one of the sponsors. Of course, just about every so-called Republican Senator up there did as well, but I’m primarily concerned with him. If you have a different one, check at www.legis.ga.gov and go under the ‘all legislation’ tab, then enter Senate in the box and 180 in that box. It will bring up the bill for you.
For those who are hazy on this and those new to this, here are the problems with this bill in a list:
It puts the “expression of religious freedom” above the “civil rights” of the individual. How is this a problem? Well, providing a business service whether it be flipping burgers, blending smoothies, baking and decorating wedding cakes, or whatever, is not generally recognized as an “expression of religious belief”. It is recognized as “doing business.” As such, you provide a service to anyone who walks in the door. Contrast this to “civil rights” which are something you are born having. You are born having Freedom of speech and the right to vote (within certain parameters.
Do not misunderstand me-I WANT people to be able to express their profoundly held spiritual beliefs of any kind. However, it is a widely held maxim in every religion that “there is a place and time for every purpose under heaven.” 1 It is my position that the marketplace is seldom the place for sermonizing and standing on soapboxes. Refusing service to ANYONE on the basis of whatever religion you follow is shooting your religion in the knees. Serve them with humility and love and let them see you as an inclusive and welcoming member of that faith. Make them want to join you. NOBODY wants to join a faith that condemns them.
This bill would expressly allow for the owners of businesses to refuse services to people such as LGBTQ (which it is primarily directed against), BUT, it could also be used against women, Black Americans, Latinx, BIPOC, Native Americans, AAPI, Jews, Middle Easterners, Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, the disabled, chronically ill, elderly, children, etc. Essentially anyone who isn’t Caucasian and who doesn’t gee haw to their liking. It’s a fascist bill. (If you need me to show you exactly how this fills the criteria to be fascist, I’ll be happy to show you. I’m not seeing fascists behind every bush because I’m imagining them. Nope, they’re standing out in the open now.)
What do we need to do? Well, what we have done before.
USE THE MEDIA TO OUR ADVANTAGE. TV, radio, print, and social media should all be used as strongly as possible. Use them to rally public resistance to this monstrosity of legislation. Make sure to NAME THE SENATORS who are sponsoring this thing. Make them justify their support for it then rip them down.
Send your objections to the Senate AND the House. The bill is currently in the Senate, but will likely be voted out. Then it will go to the House for consideration. Should the House vote it out, Kemp has indicated that he is set to sign it into law. So our goal should be to stop it before it gets to Kemp’s desk.
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Most people, me included before I got into this political arena, just assume that anybody can sign up to vote.
Not true.
Now that will come as reassurance to those who have mistakenly thought that immigrants and foreigners could just walk in and vote in their community. Also not true.
Let me give you some FACTS that, quite frankly, you should have gotten by 12th grade, but maybe you were flirting with a cute boy/girl, slept through it, were passing notes, or whatever was going on that day. (Hey, I’m older, but I remember!)
Must be a CITIZEN OF THE U.S.A. This is non-negotiable.
Must be a RESIDENT of the State where you plan on voting. This is your legal residence, not your auntie’s, grandmother’s, or best friend’s. You have to pay taxes here.
Must be a real address-not a P.O. Box. Nobody lives in postal boxes.
You MUST have the required government issued identification. If you do not have one, you can get one for free at the Elections Office or the DMV if you provide the correct paperwork. See here.
If you need assistance with voting of any kind, there are always places to call to get help. It is no problem to come to you if you can just let somebody know ahead of time. Possible solutions might include:
Getting a ride to/from the poll
Help with voting on the automated system
Help with applying for and then properly voting on an absentee ballot
Knowing who is running for which seat and what the issues are
Making sure that your name is still on the voting rolls/reregistering to vote
Getting the correct identification in order to vote
If you vote EARLY, you must know where the Early Voting in your county of residence is being held.
Currently, if you want to vote Absentee, you have to request those ballots EVERY YEAR and for EVERY ELECTION (with a few narrow exceptions.) Be careful of deadlines. The General Assembly made the timelines exceptionally short.
On Election Day, you MUST go to the precinct poll that you were assigned to on your voting card. (If you don’t remember where that is, look here.)
Remember to register to vote using the SAME NAME that is on your ID and your TAX RECORDS. This is extremely important. Why? Because if you use anything different, the poll worker will tell you that you cannot vote and they will not let you in. End of discussion. The law is on their side.
That’s the ‘nuts and bolts’ of voting. Of course, being knowledgeable about EVERY election is critical. There is no such thing as an unimportant election. They all matter. Local elections matter as much or more than the big ones. Why? Because those are the elections that determine your electric rates, what happens when your dog barks too much while the guy next door who works 3rd shift is trying to sleep, or the neighbor’s kids dam up the culvert playing and your basement floods as a result. Yeah, that stuff. We don’t think about it until it happens, but doggone, it matters.
I need your support as much now as ever. I’m trying to build up my campaign “bank” so I can work harder next year. Will you help by making monthly contributions of $5?
Who knew? I know I sure didn’t. The boys of NeverNever Land thought that Peter Pan was bringing Wendy to be like their own little “mom” to put them to bed at night, kiss their boo-boo’s, and bake cookies. (Tinkerbelle didn’t think much of the idea.)
Elmer Stewart Rhodes will be sentenced sometime in the next 30 days for helping the Twice Impeached Tangerine Twitbirdtry to instigate a full-blown coup attempt on our National Capitol building with all of our legislators inside AND try to MURDER several of them specifically. By the Grace of all that’s Holy, they failed. But people DIED. Many were injured in ways that will leave lifelong damage. PTSD is very common not just among the law enforcement but among the staff and legislators. The ramifications of what they did are far reaching and the courts are far from being done with prosecuting them. Rhodes is just the tip of the iceberg. It is definitely something that few of us will ever forget or forgive.
Representatives Bernie Thompson and Liz Cheney will bring out not just the full report of the House Select Committee on the January 6 Insurrection, but they will also release a list of names that they are sending to the Department of Justice with a recommendation for criminal prosecution. It is expected that Donald John Trump Sr’s name will top the list. Several Congressional members and Senators will also be on it from reports. If they are and if the DOJ does decide to prosecute them, we can expect the Republican Party to erupt with accusations of “a politically directed witch hunt by the DOJ.”
NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH. AG Garland would prosecute Jesus of Nazareth, Mohammed, and the Buddha if he thought he had a case. He wouldn’t if he didn’t. It’s that simple. If they didn’t want to get taken to court, they should have stayed out of it.
Voters who support these people need to take a good hard look at their own personal motives.
WHY do you support these people? Because they are against Black people in general? What is your motive for that? Have you ever been directly affected by something that a black person did TO YOU? Not something you just didn’t like but something that was actually detrimental. Playing loud music doesn’t count because white people play loud music. Give me something real.
You say that you don’t like the Jews. Did you remember that Jesus was a Jew? And his mother was a Jew? All 12 of the Disciples were Jews? Paul was even a Jewish lawyer! About 1/3 of Trump’s attorneys are Jews including Stephen Miller and Michael Cohen. Be very careful about saying that you hate Jews. And, yes, the Holocaust did happen. Not just to Jews. It also happened to the Gypsies (Romany) tribes, a lot of just disabled people, mentally challenged people, transvestites, LGBTQ, Polish, French, and others. The 6 million number is just the Jewish people. All together the total number is estimated to be closer to 10 million. You might have been one of them. You don’t get to do the “yeah, but”s. Nope, sorry. The challenge that The Man from Galilee gave us was to love and take care of our fellow human beings and He didn’t give out exceptions. There AREN’T any carve outs. So either you do or you’re out. But at least be honest. Don’t be calling yourself a Christian if you can’t do that.
Did you know that The Founding Fathers had a BIG fight over that mention of “God” in the original documents? They did. The reason was that about half of them were either atheists or agnostics. (Oops, so much for the “Christian” part of our Nation’s founding.) The rest of them were various brands. Franklin was a Quaker. Some of the others were Presbyterians, Methodists, and Anglicans. (Sorry, no Baptists-that church didn’t exist then.) One or two may have been Catholic. Probably a Jew was in there somewhere. Point is, they had all sorts of differing viewpoints about the origins of the universe and mankind’s place in it. The more “religious” wanted to put a faith based viewpoint in there and the “secular” folks said NO. The compromise was reached that they would use a concept of a ‘Nature God”-a sort of natural force of the universe. This “God” was not an entity that any of them worshipped but would have been the driving force behind creation and all that derived from it. So to say that this country was “founded on Christian principles” is in fact a total lie. It isn’t. It is, however, founded on morals and ethics which are very close to what Christianity, Judaism, and all the world’s religions teach.
There is no such thing as “states’ rights”. We settled that question in 1865. Get the hell over it. This is a country that is united. States’ rights is a concept that would make each state essentially an independent “country” with the right to sign treaties with foreign governments, wage wars, have their own armies, provide their own road systems, postal services, passports to go to the next state, customs import/export taxes, and so on. Anybody who starts telling you that we need to start honoring states’ rights doesn’t know what the effing hell they are talking about. It would be a logistical and governmental nightmare. None of the states could do it with the possible exception of California. Certainly not Georgia.
The operative word for Rhodes group is “proud BOYS“. Just look at them-really look at them. All white dudes, every last one of them in various stages of obesity, out of shape (now, seriously, run for 5 miles with a full 70# pack?), decked out in every piece of hardware they can afford like they are wearing Boy Scout badges or something, wearing their pants with the belt buckles so low that if they had to really run the garment would fall off, and trying to look tough TO EACH OTHER. Oh, they’ve got firepower and some of it is serious. But do I think those guys could stand up to these guys down here at Fort Benning training as Army Rangers? It is to laugh. I know who has the training, weapons, and the discipline and it’s not Rhodes’ ‘BOYS’. Give me a break.
So Rhodes and some of his co-conspirators are going to prison-hopefully for a long stretch. Now to get the politicos who were also in on this. Co-Chairs Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney are due to release the recommendations of their committee for criminal charges next week. Merry Christmas, folks. I hope you get lousy attorneys.
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He actually isn’t anybody in particular. The legend is that he was first drawn sometime around 1812 as a stand-in for the federal government during the War of 1812. Assuming that is true, he’d be 210 years old. Doesn’t look too bad for such an old geezer. But he’s been pointing that finger, trying to recruit men for the military, being fat shamed by the public for various reasons, ploughing fields, rolling up his sleeves for the industrial push for the war effort in WWII, made into an infant, and even made into various other guises for other reasons. He’s been useful though.
Not that I think anyone reading something I write would actually DO such a thing, but they can remind other people of the choice that they have.
It is also a reminder that NOT VOTING is a vote for the Republican and you certainly do not want to be guilty of THAT sin against our country.
We all know the Senator Warnock is very qualified to be in that office and that he needs to be there for the next six years. We also know that having him there will make Senators Manchin and Sinema much less of a threat to our efforts in the Senate and virtually guarantee judicial confirmations for at least the next two years. Maybe more if we continue to hold it in 2024. Senator Ossoff isn’t due to run again until 2026.
The other thing we know is that Walker is NOT EVEN A RESIDENT OF GEORGIA. He’s paying taxes on a house in Texas that is legally on file as his “principle place of residence.” If that’s so, then he shouldn’t even be RUNNING for the office. You are supposed to reside in the state you represent. He has NEVER actually had residence in the state. Not even when he played for UGA. Students don’t have legal residence.
We also know about all his other disqualifications and lies. So why the Republicans even nominated him? Because he’s a broken black man who is easy to tell what to do. He’s the perfect caricature of the Black slave that they all secretly want-big, dumb, biddable, has mental problems, sometimes violent, but generally speaking, you can get him to do exactly what you want him to do. And they don’t care if he runs around with all the women getting babies all over the place. That just fits their image of what all black males are like anyway. It’s wrong, but they don’t care. Their attitudes infuriate me. I know better. I also know that THEIR males do the same thing and they look the other way. That pisses me off, too.
Make sure you vote starting today, November 28-December 3 or on December 6. Michelle Obama is right. We have to vote….like our lives depend on it. Like our country depends on it.
That was my grandmother’s phrase for something like this when she wanted to use profanity and knew she couldn’t as the wife of a very prominent deacon in the church. (Grandma was a pistol, let me tell you. If you’ve ever seen The Beverly Hillbillies, you’ve seen a version of her. Granny Clampett was the spitting image of my grandmother except she didn’t make hooch. I suspect she knew how, though. Grandma grew up as #3 out of 13 in rural Georgia. I learned a lot from her and my grandfather.)
This year in Georgia, “Brainless” Kemp has signed legislation for what is called “Constitutional Carry” of concealed weapons without the benefit of having had a concealed carry permit taken out and frequently by people who are domestic violence abusers, have mental health issues, or other qualifying concerns. They are being allowed to just stick a handgun in their pants, jacket pocket, or purse, and walk around with it. Just wonderful, people. In the rose-colored glasses of the gun lovers’ world, now more people will be able to pull out a weapon and shoot people. The only problem with that is WHICH PEOPLE? Because it is a fact that of all crime being committed only 0.1% or 1 out of 1000 is stopped by a civilian with any kind of weapon. Those are really piss poor odds. They’re not quite as bad as Powerball, but they’re getting there.
BTW, one of the sponsors of that legislation was Randy Robertson. Now you’d think that he’d know that civilians are 99.9% of the time miserable shots in crisis with handguns since he’s an ex-sheriff’s deputy and has his own security agency down in Columbus. You’d think. But no. He’s got gun fever BAD. It works like that thing with being a hammer and believing that the solution to every problem is a nail. Yeppers. That’s our boy Randy. Guns will fix crime. And if you can’t shoot them, you lock them up. Life is simple when things are black and white. Except Life isn’t like that.
Another piece of legislation that Mr. Ambitious Brainless Kemp (who I think is gunning for the White House, God Help Us) signed and is pushing hard is a ban on abortions after 6 weeks which is after “detection of fetal cardiac activity”. Notice that they have REMOVED the fetal heartbeat wording because Stacey Abrams, the Democrats, and the medical community pushed back so hard on that. There IS NO HEART at that stage of development. It is merely a few fibers twitching. That’s it. Now exactly how that becomes a criteria of viability is, honestly, beyond logic. They’ve romanticized this to freaking death (excuse me for that). Very, very, very few even know they’ve missed a period much less are pregnant. This law is cruel, punitive, and patriarchal in the extreme.
The courts have it now and it’s going back and forth. We have an injunction to keep it from being enforced, no, we don’t, now we do, now we don’t. I’m beyond the age of worrying, but JFC, I certainly feel for those who are in those shoes. This is as bad as medieval torture or something the Taliban dreamed up. Considering that it is religious fanatics doing it, that’s exactly what it is. Call it what it is. Sharia law. If they don’t like, then stop doing it.
Their viewpoint on life is definitely backwards from everything that I was taught about how a moral, ethical, and, for that matter, person of Christian values should live. It’s 180 degrees from mine. If they want to sit down with me and compare, I’m willing. But I won’t be there for a shouting match or a conversion. If that starts, I’m gone. I’ve been there and done that and I’m out of reasons to do it again.
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As humans, we are geared to be the ones who give to someone else. It just feels odd to be the one who accepts something when you have no possible way of giving a gift back or doing a favor in return. It’s why it is so difficult to fundraise for charities, political campaigns, or even people in desperate need of help (sickness, natural disaster, legal troubles, etc.) To go and ask for gifts of time, service, donations of food, items to use, or just money, seems weird and crass. So most of us have an extremely hard time doing it.
It’s the reason that it is so hard to get those collection plates/baskets filled on worship days at Churches, synagogues, and mosques. People just resist turning loose of their money. The leaders have a difficult time trying to force themselves to “make the ask”. The circle continues on and on.
Here’s the thing, though: if you can make people stop and realize how much they have right now in this moment in time that they can be grateful for, and that, like the trees and the stars in the universe, we have the absolute right to be here, the wonder of it all is overwhelming. You want to share. You want to find a way to make someone else’s life better because yours is unbelievably good and you’re grateful for that. Likewise, it becomes a gift to receive these blessings from others because you feel the love and joy coming through them as they share what they have with you.
Gratitude is indeed a two-way thing. It is love coming to visit and love going out to welcome the visitor. May we always find it in our hearts every single day. Namaste.
Now there’s a concept that the people who don’t like “wokeness” will really have a time with! They’re always big on how if poor people were more grateful for what they were getting, they would take better care of their homes, cars, clothes,…and they would last longer and so on so forth. Sometimes I get fed up with them, but most of the time, it’s just better to tune the bastards out. They don’t know what they are talking about. That means it’s not worth my time and energy to try to either: A. educate them, mainly because they think they know more than I do and won’t learn anything anyway, or B. I’ll just get angry and beat my head against a brick wall and have only a bruised head for my trouble. Never mind.
I do like this quote, though. You need to not only feel gratitude, but express it and follow through or you and it will cease to exist at all. Electricity is like that. You can only store so much energy, then it must be discharged in some fashion either in one burst or in a controlled way.
Gratitude does have energy and it is a positive energy. It makes you (giver) and the other person (receiver) feel warm and connected. You appreciated something that they have given to you whether a service, feeling, or object and it elicited an emotional response that was positive. By expressing that response, the circle is completed.
Rural people are known for being generous of their resources to travelers and wanderers. We know how far it might be to the next town or city and how much effort it is going to take to get there. We’re willing to help people who just need a little extra. Southerners in general are welcoming and warm. It’s not just those pecan pies, banana puddings, and hummingbird cakes either. If a storm hits, we’ll be over with the chain saws to help neighbors clear the trees off fence lines and houses. Or help sit with dogs and cats when there’s illness in the family and you have to be gone. We’re just there. Never expecting something in return.
You don’t ever take things for granted, though. Being grateful is trained into us. Expressing gratitude is something that we learn from the time we are toddlers. Receiving things is great, but giving thanks for what you get is even better and woe be unto the child who neglects her/his thank yous!
Giving gratitude or thanks should be a year around thing. We celebrate the fall harvest time now with a feast with relatives, friends, and words of thanks. Let us all be in recognition that we live in relative peace and comfort while others are in war and pending winter’s deprivation and cold in Ukraine. Europe will be cold, too, because of Putin’s decision to cut off their gas supply. We can and should send what aid we can to fellow human beings. I am grateful for what I have this night that I will sleep in a warm, safe bed. Somewhere over there, another woman will not. I can pay higher gas prices if it means she and her family gets blankets. I’ll just stay home a little more.
Thank you for reading my words. Thank you for being an American who votes and who cares about our country. Thank you for working to help others to have a better life.
Some Georgians can start voting this week. I’ve already gotten my mail-in ballot and will put that back in the mail ASAP. I have no intention of allowing my vote to go uncounted. Neither does my husband or his 100 year old mother. We vote.
Vote is a verb which, in case you’ve forgotten, is an action word. It means you DO SOMETHING. You can be a VOTER, but you have to actively do VOTING. It is not a belief. It is an activity, an affirmation of your commitment to little ‘d’ democracy, and your responsibility as a citizen of this country.
Now there are people among us who are trying to UNDERMINE our democracy and tell us that it is failing because people are not involved in voting and just don’t care about how they are governed anyway. They argue that we need people who will be “professional” government caretakers or some such who will run things for us and give us things like military protection from outside threats, police protection, prisons for law breakers, and regulate our commerce so that we will always get the food and goods that we need. And it sounds just wonderful.
But what they DON’T tell us is the truth.
That the countries who already live under these systems are poor and oppressed. Most of their people live in 300-400 square foot apartments in dingy buildings with little heat and no AC. Elevators rarely work. The government decides what sort of work you will do and you do it 7 days a week in most cases. Children go to government schools and only the very brightest are allowed to go to university. All have to join the “Party”. If they rebel, they will be imprisoned. If that happens, you may never see them again. If you are trained for a job, you will only be trained enough to do one particular aspect of the job. That way, you can never hope to be promoted.
Only the very, very rich and very lucky who get to be prominent in the Party AND the military will gain much of anything under this system. It’s called Fascism. If you are in the Haves, life is pretty good. Until it isn’t. You can lose everything in a split second. Just ask those guys who walked out of 7th floor windows for no known reason. Suddenly, their businesses belonged to Vladimir Putin or one of his best friends. No word on the fate of their families.
We have wolves in our midst. They are people like Stephen Miller (regularly on Truth/Twitter/etc), Sebastian Gorka (who is broadcasting every weekday on conservative radio stations), Steve Bannon (broadcasting on his station until they haul his hairy, dirty ass off to prison for awhile), Roger Stone (on Truth Social, Twitter, and heaven only knows where else spreading his poison), Sarah Palin, Kayleigh McEnany, Donald Trump Sr. & Jr., Eric & Lara Trump, the Guilfoyle thing, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and more. They are all talking up this garbage. They are Fascist wolves in sheep’s fleeces.
And the sheeple are flocking around them and baa-ing for more. Great. Fantastic. It makes you wonder what to do.
Got a suggestion. Pen them all up and let’s have a sheep shearing.
There’s only one really good way to find out who’s under that sheep fleece and that’s to shear off the fleece. Basically, it’s simply a haircut. The clippers are bigger and noisier than the ones a barber uses, but really it is the same thing. I’ve done this for my horses. They enjoy it. It makes them cooler.
But these wolves won’t be happy because it will expose them for who they are and that’s LIARS, FRAUDS, and CHEATS. They’re not doing what they are doing for the good of anyone but themselves. They’re being PAID to turn our country into a fascist state.
Who’s willing to follow the money? The trail is there if you are willing to go after it.
Please be aware this is only my opinion. I have always had an abiding interest in all things in the law including the SCOTUS. I am NOT an attorney.
C.J. John Roberts is and always has been a conservative judge. Some of his opinions I haven’t particularly agreed with, but some I have. He tends to be more moderate in his approach to the law and he does not seem to put his religion on the bench right beside him. He has the responsibility of oversight of the Court. It is that part of his job that I have problems with.
Justices are, in theory, supposed to ‘know the law’ and to render judgements on the cases that come before based solely upon the law as they understand it (both as written and as the people who wrote the law intended for it to be used aka the “spirit of the law”.) It is when they start bringing their own personal biases, whatever that might be, to the bench that we have problems. In this case, we have not one, but FIVE of the justices that are doing just in violation of their oaths. One of them, Clarence Thomas, is openly defying legal ethics by refusing to recuse himself from cases that involve himself and/or his wife, Virginia “Ginnie” Thomas. This is unacceptable on every level of legal and moral ethics.
What makes it worse in my view is that C.J. Roberts is trying to “cover” for him. Now come on here!
Congress and the public are offering to create something that has been needed from the start, but was considered to be “unnecessary” because it was thought that “all justices would have such high moral and ethical character” that an Ethical Standard code would be insulting. Apparently, such is not the case. They can be corrupted by one or more of the most powerful lures of society: sex, money, or power (ideology).
Why is he turning down the help? Good question and one I have no plausible answer to. Presumably, the Federalist Society has something to do with this since they essentially picked all five of the justices involved. I’d say that’s a pretty safe bet. They also have a very tight grip on a number of Senators and Congressmen/women.
Don’t get me wrong here. I am a person of faith myself. I want people of high morals and ethics in our government. However, you can have high morals and ethics and be Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Jewish, Atheist, Agnostic, Catholic, Christian of any number of flavors, Shamanic, or whatever. That is why the Founders specifically wrote into the Bill of Rights, 1st Amendment, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” (direct quote)and that includes making laws that even indirectly establish a religious viewpoint of ONE PARTICULAR BRANCH OF ONE PARTICULAR RELIGION. The justices are not dumb. They know this. They are aware they are breaching 1st Amendment Rights. They are doing it under the guise of their own religious beliefs. That violates their oaths of office and legal ethics.
Why won’t C.J. Roberts take action and “clean his own house”? Perhaps his sump pump is broken? His wet/dry vacuum is on the fritz? Whatever it is, we’re not seeing any action and that means a headless SCOTUS. That’s bad.
Potential Solutions
Impeach at least Clarence Thomas for breach of duty of office. You’ve got Justice Jackson on the bench so the race card won’t come into play. Remove him from the bench. Have somebody ready to nominate to replace him.
Impeach Alito for breach of duty of office. This might be a little harder, but it seems reasonable to me. He’s been running around bragging about what is next on his agenda of laws that he wants to ‘take down’.
Impeach and remove Kavanaugh, Coney-Barrett, and maybe Gorsuch for outright perjury in their confirmation hearing, contempt of the Senate, and a list of other things. Might be difficult to do with the GOP House, but the margin is so slim that it seems possible if they want to negotiate other things.
Expand the SCOTUS to 13/15 seats. This is LONG overdue. We have had 13 appellate courts for years. The Court get mountains of writs wanting to be heard for every session. There is no way that justice is being adequately served with so many rejections going out. It’s impossible. The logic somebody is using is just plain broken. Take the bench and have half hear the odd numbered Districts this year and the other half hear the even numbered districts. Next year, switch them. Chief Justice would serve as mediator/tie-breaker. We would get a lot more cases heard and decided. Case backlogs would begin to clear out.
Congress writes Ethical Standards for the SCOTUS with the assistance of the American Bar Association. (Federalist Society to stay OUT of it.) Once signed by the President, the Chief Justice would then have something to enforce conformity of behavior and actions of the justices appointed to the Court. Nothing about this should be ‘optional’.
There are probably others that can add to, change, and comment on my ‘solutions’. I’m aware of that. Most of this is “above my pay grade” especially since I don’t have a pay grade right now. We need to do something SOON. Trouble is, we have a lot of things that need to be handled SOON. Where do you start?
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Donald John Trump Senior has officially declared his candidacy for the THIRD TIME for the Presidency of the United States of America. God help us all. Once was more than enough for me. I wasn’t all that crazy about Hillary Clinton but I knew he was a rotten, low-down stinker from the jump. What I didn’t realize at the time was that he was enamored of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jung Un, and other dictators around the world and a student of none other than Adolf Hitler. Pile that on to his considerable list of extremely unsavory attributes, and I had to wonder how he ever got invited to go to anything. But then I remembered that the presence (or the appearance of having) money cleanses the palate of some people and they’ll gag down just about anything or anybody. Ethics? Morals? They have no acquaintance.
So it seems that the American “Moral Majority” has also had its conscience either surgically removed or permanently numbed by cutting the nerve that enables shock, revulsion, and reviling of real evil and wrongdoing. They embraced this man who embodied every single one of the so-called Seven Deadly Sins: Adultery (check-cheated on all three wives), Greed (check-stole from numerous charities and most recently from candidates that he endorsed), Gluttony (check-well known for eating habits that included sending out for late night runs for KFC, Arby’s, Chic-Fil-A, ice cream, and chocolate cake-all at the same time), Pride (check – well-known for his bragging about accomplishments that are inflated, unreal, and totally false, and will not tolerate any person telling him that he is incorrect or someone else did better), Lust (check-has been accused by at least 26 women of sexual assault with the possibility of more-some are underage), Anger (check-notorious rages in which he lashes out at anyone and everyone roaring loudly and throwing whatever is handy-the walls of the White House were repeatedly hit with food containing ketchup), and Laziness (check-he is well-known for his inability to walk very far. At a high level meeting in Europe, he asked for a golf cart to take him with other dignitaries down the street. The rest of the heads of state walked. He never entered the Oval Office before noon and frequently stayed only a couple of hours before leaving to play golf.)
Yet this is the guy they decided was heaven ordained to be in the White House? They have a weird set of standards if that’s so. To go from a Man who was recognized to be without sin to this guy? That’s a stretch to put it charitably.
Joe Biden defeated him on his re-election bid by 81 million votes. That’s not exactly a squeaker margin. Yet this guy insisted that the election had been ‘stolen’. Truth be told, he’d been saying that since early 2020. It’s now Nov. 2022 and he’s finally admitting that he lost. Oh, really now. And just exactly what is that going to do with the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and the rest of the Right Wing Nut Jobs aka Nazis that want to use violence to put him back in power? We need to think about this however much we don’t want to because the danger is real. January 6, 2021 was just a test. They’ll try again now that he’s announced.
He’s in serious legal jeopardy. Announcing a political run doesn’t cancel anything out. He’s getting closer to losing his businesses in NYS which will mean tremendous financial losses. He has potential criminal charges pending in Georgia which will probably come down very soon. AG Merrick Garland may hand him federal criminal charges stemming from the January 6th hearings. E. Jean Carrol has a civil case pending against him in NYS that may very well have an additional criminal charge added under a new law for Adult Victims of Sexual Violence. Trump is not going to get out of all this unscathed. His legal team is crappy and his attackers are too good.
I don’t know where any of this is headed. I do know that all of us need to pay close attention or we will lose our democracy yet. We have a SCOTUS that has gone rogue. We have a Governor in Georgia who thinks he has his own private party to do as he pleases with. He’s a melomaniac who believes he can have and do anything. Governor DeSantis in Florida is much the same. So is Greg Abbott in Texas. We need to expose these people for who they are and what they are doing to our states.
Freedom isn’t free, folks. We have to fight for it. I intend to do so. What’s your plan? Comment and let me know. Better yet-join the Resistance and Invisible and organize in the fight!! Participate in your local city, county, and state government. Let them know you are aware of what they are doing. FIGHT BACK!!
This is a post that I read and enjoyed. She copied/pasted an article of Bernie Sanders that I find very pertinent to what I want to work toward. We do have more to offer than the Republican fascists. They are retro-gressive in their viewpoints. We want to move forward. They want to move us BACKWARDS. In fact, all the way back to 1794 where only wealthy WHITE MEN COULD VOTE. I see no advantage in that. See what you think. Comments are welcome. Discussion is encouraged. Please no profanity and keep it civil. Name calling doesn’t help anybody. Looking forward to your input.
As most of you know, I have high regard for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. As an Independent and a democratic-socialist, he stands about as much chance of ever rising to the presidency as I do, but he’s a good man who is far more concerned with the people of the world than he is […]
Just because the numbers did not go my way does not mean that I’m quitting. Far from it. I’m taking a break, then I’ll be back. Persistence is what I am good at doing. Refresh yourselves, drink deeply at whatever springs of renewal you need, and then come back fighting. They just think they won this election.
I am so proud of the Democratic Party in Georgia for the sheer diversity and QUALITY of the candidates in this race. It is unbelievably representative of the faces I see every single day in Georgia. Can’t say that about the other side. They look like Wonder Bread. They’re so white, it is blinding.
Let’s look at this slate closer: Rev. Raphael Warnockholds the distinction of being the first black Democratic Senator from Georgia EVER. He got there last year in a run off against Kelly Loeffler, a very wealthy white woman appointed by Kemp because of her donations and her extreme right wing views. Both she and Kemp thought she would be a “shoo-in” for in the election to fill out the rest of the term. Rev. Warnock proved them wrong on January 5th. It’s time to prove the Republicans wrong again on November 8 and defeat a brain-damaged football player, Herschel Walker.
On the Congressional side, Val Almonord, M.D, who was originally from Haiti, now an American citizen, is running against Drew Ferguson in the 3rd District. This is his second try. Dr. Almonord brings a wealth of experience in healthcare, a deep sense of compassion, and a driving passion to help the poor and underserved particularly in the rural areas. He knows intimately of the subject and would be a superior representative for our district in Washington.
Those are the FEDERAL races. Two extremely well-qualified men, both from lowly backgrounds, both of whom want to use their knowledge and experience in service to Georgians, and they just happen to be men of color.
On the STATE level, we have the woman who has had the audacity to say that she not only wants to be Governor of Georgia, but she fully intends to realize that goal. That woman is Stacey Abrams. She also has an audacious plan for Georgia, and it is one that is breathtaking. (I have followed her and really do want to help her implement the changes that she has on her platform.)
As her running mate, Charlie Bailey is a fighter. He has been a prosecutor for a number of years and knows how to get to work to get the job done. You simply do not get to be a successful prosecutor if you can’t win cases and Charlie did that. His record against organized crime is phenomenal. We have a problem with that here in Georgia and he wants to help put laws in place to help in the fight. That’s another reason I want to be in the Senate. Charlie would preside in the Senate and I want to be there to help him get those bills passed. This is a team effort after all.
This woman is dynamite in a small package. Bee Nguyen is a Vietnamese immigrant who treasures both her heritage and her citizenship as an American. She has been the bane of the GOP Senators who wanted to just ‘slide’ some bills through, but Bee wanted to check their facts and figures and, boy, did she ever find them not even close to what she came up with. Much like the Congresswoman from California with the whiteboards, Bee asked the hard questions and demanded answers. She’ll make an excellent Secretary of State. The Republicans might not enjoy the questions she’ll be asking, but that’s their problem, right?
Another Senator who is stepping up to fight the hard battles is Jen Jordan. Jen is a lawyer, mom, and the child of a single mom. She knows what it is like to scrimp and save, go to school on a Hope scholarship, Pell grant, work multiple minimum wage jobs, and lose sleep so she could make ends meet. She has her own civil litigation law firm and has won some complex cases. She knows her way around the law and it shows. We need someone like her who has actually been in a courtroom (which Chris Carr never has been) to represent Georgia and to help enforce the laws of our State. Attorney General is an important job and she can fill it with honor and integrity. (Instead of trying to overturn elections and pass off fake electors like Carr has done.)
Janice Laws Robinson is a knowledgeable lady about insurance in/outs and could really do a great job of cleaning up (and OUT) some of the log jams that have plagued the insurance commissioners office for many years. It has been a “good old boys” world for too long and, as often happens, when the men mess it up, you need to send in a woman to clean it up.
This young woman is unusual in a couple of ways. First of all, she’s a woman in a very male dominated profession. Secondly, she is a person of color in a very WHITE dominated field. Thirdly, of all things, her crop is cut FLOWERS. Meet Nakita Hemingway, candidate for Agriculture Commissioner. It seems that there isn’t much that she cannot do once she puts her mind to it.
Carolyn Hugley and Debbie Buckner are running for GA State House and the boundaries of their districts have changed. You may find their names on your ballot and not have been aware that the redistricting had moved things around.
Patty Durand will NOT be on Tuesday’s ballot for Public Service Commissioner. Neither will Sheila Edwards. Those posts became contested in a legal dispute and there will be a special election in December.
Lastly, there’s ME! I’m Ellen Wright and I’m running for GA State Senate D29. We all are asking for your vote and requesting that you continue to vote blue down the rest of the ballot. Our democracy is at stake. The attack on Paul Pelosi shows that they are willing to use violence to get what they want. We have to stop them.
This is going to be a “quick and dirty” history lesson because to fully do it justice would take much, much too long. So just hang on, buckle your seat belts, and if you want more info, Google will take you there. It’s bloody, brutal, and endlessly fascinating.
The Chinese tried it with their Imperial Dynasties. Or rather they had their Emperors as priest and liaison to the gods for the people. It was a duality of roles that mixed both their religion with their government in the most intimate way possible just short of declaring that the Emperor WAS a god on earth.
The Japanese did declare their Emperors to be Gods on earth up until Emperor Hirohito abdicated his throne in the 20th century. It was part of the culture that sent their men out to die in the kamikaze missions in the belief that they would be dying for the Emperor.
In Africa, the Egyptians declared their pharaohs to be gods. Consequently, there were no mere mortals good enough for them to marry so they had to marry members of their own families. The infighting among cousins and associates made for somewhat short dynastic lines. In later times, Omar al-Gaddafi in Libya to the west would declare himself a Supreme Leader and Ruler of all of North Africa. He would tell the world that he was a god. So would Emperor Haile Sailasse of Ethiopia who styled himself as the Lion of Judah or the Leader of the Lost Tribe of Israel. (Bob Marley famously had his heart sent over there to be buried next to the man when he died.)
The Aztecs and Incas, among others in South and Central America, had cultures where the priests either ruled or co-ruled with warlords. Human sacrifice was apparently commonplace. Slavery of conquered peoples was known. Life was brutal on the bottom, but luxurious on the top. The Spanish and Portuguese soldiers and priests came in and destroyed most of these civilizations in the name of their religion to take the land and the gold.
The Caucasians in Europe were not as bold (usually) about declaring themselves gods, although a couple of the Roman emperors did and one declared his horse was. Mostly it was the popes who tried to clamp down on what they saw as the rampant immorality of both the populace and the nobility. It wasn’t altruistic in nature nor was it strictly piety, although they did cloak it “in the name of God”. If the ruling nobility decided to do something remotely pious (such as traipse off to the Holy Land on a Crusade with his knights), you can bet there was more than one priest involved in telling him that it was his “duty to God” to do so. In the meantime, while he was gone, said priests would be running the country and looting the treasury among other things.
All of the countries in Europe went back and forth between Catholicism and Protestism once Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of the church. England, in particular, had had problems since Henry VIII decided to break with the Catholic church and form the Anglican church so he could divorce Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn. They all had “state religions” and if you didn’t go to the “state sanctioned church”, then you didn’t get business from the right people, your family was shunned, you paid more taxes, your daughters might get raped, your house might be burned down, etc. And if you happened to be JEWISH, things could get really rough. Soldiers might come and get both parents, take them off, and torture them for no reason at all. If they died, who cared? They were Jews.
In the early 1600s, the people got tired of the Catholics doing this crazy stuff, and started following a man named Oliver Cromwell who was a Protestant. The country flipped to being that for awhile. But it was worse. So in 1611, he was executed, and the monarchy and Catholicism/Anglicans came back. Be careful what you wish for.
Here in the USA, we have not been immune. We have had our share of religious people trying to tell us that politics and religion belong together. It is precisely BECAUSE of what happened to Oliver Cromwell, James II, Charles II, George I, II, III, and IV that our Founders wrote into our founding documents to beware the incorporation of religion into our government.
It’s not that we do not want men and women of high moral character in government. We most certainly do. But what we do NOT WANT or NEED is the incorporation of ONE religion above any other and the ENFORCEMENT of the practice of that religion BY THE USE OF LAW upon our citizens. It is that part that is anathema to the entire concept of democracy and freedom. That we will not stand for.
I’m seeing that our President is slowly coming around to this conclusion. Chuck Schumer is a die hard bipartisan guy, bless his heart. He wants everybody to go away happy. Nancy Pelosi on the other hand came to this conclusion sometime in the Trump administration. Talking to brick walls is a waste of time.
There’s an old joke, “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up.” That’s these folks. They don’t want to hear any facts that don’t agree with what they have already decided is the truth. When somebody is like that, just go back in the barn and crank up the front end loader. You’re going to need it to get through the pile of utter BS they will throw at you.
Or, in my case, I go get in the 4×4 and switch over to 4 wheel drive. They are not going to stop me. Slow me down maybe. Stop me-no.
Don’t get me wrong, I like brick in small doses. We have a brick fireplace in the house that has two fireplaces (upstairs/downstairs), the chimney for the wood burning furnace, and the back side is the wall of our kitchen. I love it. But metaphorically speaking, pounding my head against a brick wall just because I can seems like a waste of time and all I’m going to get is angry. So why do it to start with? Ah, there’s the question.
Some people are just born to placate. They want everybody to be happy. I have news for them. The only way some people are going to be happy is when they see you beating yourself up because you can’t get them to change. I refuse to make those folks happy.
My view? Somebody is not going to be happy no matter what you do. If they can’t (for whatever reason they choose to come up with) or just plain WON’T meet you in the middle, go ahead without them. It’s what Schumer and Pelosi did with the Infrastructure Bill and we finally have things happening. The Republicans are trying to claim credit, but we know better. THEY ALL VOTED AGAINST IT.
Now we can tell people it was all ours and they’re claiming false glory. Isn’t that just the craziest thing?
Come on over to the side that wants you to have a good life-one where you can get the things you need when and where you need them in a timely fashion. Vote BLUE IN 2022.
I’m Ellen Wright candidate for GA State Senate D29. I’m asking for your vote on November 8.
I went to and participated in the Candidate Forum hosted by the LaGrange/Troup County Chamber of Commerce and the Lagrange Daily News. My opponent was there, of course. I really don’t care for the things because you cannot get into the topics with answers that are only one minute long and ‘off-the-cuff’. I’m a more “in depth” kind of person and those things frustrate me no end. But they are something that you have to do in political life, so you go, smile, and do the best you can.
My blog posts on here are a much better answer to those questions than I could possibly do in that forum. I’ve delved into issues much more deeply and thoroughly. Thing is, there is so much more to say. There always is.
Healthcare: He’s very proud of getting Mercer to partner with Morehouse Medical School and put up clinics in south Harris County. That is a good thing and very commendable. However, he leaves out the fact that those clinics might as well be IN Columbus. They don’t really help the people who live up in Pine Mountain Valley, Shiloh, Mountain Hill, or Antioch. The folks who live out there STILL have to drive a long ways in for healthcare, and I can guarantee you that if a woman has a baby’s foot coming out first, she is NOT going to a clinic that has medical students working. She’s wanting a DOCTOR that has done this before or, at the very least, mid-wives and nurse practitioners who are specially trained in OB.
Plus it leaves out the moms in rural areas down dirt roads with no car and no neighbors who can’t get somebody to watch the current toddlers in the house while she goes to the doctor IF somebody can come get her IF she can come up with gas money and IF they can get off work that day IF the car is running. Does he even know those houses exist? I do. I go down those roads. Heck, I grew up on a dirt road. My grandparents had kinfolk who still had privies. Some folks back up those dirt roads do, too. We think in terms of cell phones. They just want a good well pump that works and a roof that doesn’t leak.
Affordable housing: The new developments around me are all on lots that REQUIRE houses that will cost in the $300K+ range. Now I know the county wants to plan for “better” developments to raise the tax base and I know the land owners around want any new construction to be something that raises their property value, too. That’s natural. However, if you want jobs, which people swear they do, the people who work at the bottom of the employment ladder have got to have somewhere to live. Right now, KIA says they are having problems hiring due to “lack of affordable housing”. They pay some pretty good wages, too. That tells me that we need construction in the $95-125K range. Perhaps our county planners need to rethink the mini-housing thing?
Responsible Job Growth: Now the big worldwide companies are nice, and I’m not against them. The KIAs, Amazons, Duracells, TSYS, AFLACs, and all those guys are fine in their way but they all have one problem, i.e. they all tend to build big box buildings and pull in employees from all over. That means Joe Smith, Betsy Jones, and Frank Brown from itty, bitty crossroads places that may not even have a post office wind up driving 25-35 miles one way to get to work. Meanwhile, the crossroads store they were buying their fish bait, lottery tickets, and tanks of gas, is going to close up and become another empty building boarded up on the roadside. That little town where they went to church is going to slowly die, too. I don’t think that’s right.
What I want to see is a LOT more support for small businesses. For example: Woodbury has a little restaurant called the Blackbird Cafe. Down the street a couple doors is an antique and collectibles shop. Just mom and pop type places, but fun to go in and spend some time. Smitty’s is out on the highway and does a pretty good amount of business. The old fruit stand on the other side of town is getting a BIG upgrade. It’s been slow, but it’s looking better for Woodbury. Some other businesses could use a cash infusion. It would definitely bring more jobs LOCALLY into the town. The same could be said for Gay and Alvaton. Manchester and Greenville seem hollow when you drive through them. That’s one county.
Common sense gun laws:No, I do not want to take anybody’s guns. I recognize that people who live rural might need a gun. I live on 30 acres myself. Give me a break, folks. Apart from hunting, there’s rabid coons, coyotes, and whatnot out there and I have livestock. What I am talking about is essentially the same thing as a Driver’s license. A car is considered under the law as a deadly weapon and you are not allowed to drive one until you have proven that you know the laws and have the minimum skills to operate one. If you want to ride a motorcycle, then you have to prove to them you can do that. CDL/HAZMAT drivers do the same thing. Your car is registered with the state and has to have a tag or you’ll be pulled over and ticketed (the first time-try it some more and the car is THEIRS.) My stance on guns is: why aren’t we doing the same thing with them?
Don’t EVEN start with the arguments about all the guns already out there, the criminals, and blah, blah, blah. I’ve heard it and, to tell you the truth, I think it’s childish. It sounds like a kid saying, ‘But, DAD, ALL the other kids have…..” If that makes you mad, you’re just going to have to be mad. I’m not listening.
We have to start somewhere, sometime. Now is as good a time as any. The situation is not getting better. In fact, it is getting worse. So let’s begin and at least we can say we’re trying.
That’s it for this time. Look through the other posts to see more thoughts and views. I’m Ellen Wright, candidate for GA State Senate D29, and I hope I can count on your vote.
In 1933, the Germans did not want to get involved with the government squabbles going on. One side wanted to side with Great Britain, while one side wanted a very conservative form of government that excluded immigrants, the gypsies (Romany), and Jews because they said they took away jobs from German citizens. The gypsies were said to be a “criminal element” that were always stealing wherever they went, the women were “loose”, and the children were “wild delinquents” that were unschooled. The immigrants were reviled for not speaking their language, for needing help in re-settling, and for just being different particularly if they practice a different style of religion even if it was Christian. The Jews? Well, they were Jews-the people who crucified Jesus, and besides that “everyone” knew that they “ran” the banking system, the jewelry trades, and knew where all the gold, diamonds, and art that was high end was hidden. This was even if they were poor bakers, tailors, and rabbis.
If this sounds like something you might read on Breitbart or some of the other right-wing website, there’s a reason for that. It is all straight out of Adolf Hitler’s writings and his methods of doing things. Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Donald Trump, Ginni Thomas, Clarence Thomas, Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Stephen Miller, and others are all KNOWN DEVOTEES of Mein Kampf and Fascism.
Why didn’t the Germans stop it then? Simple. They didn’t want to get involved. Those few who did speak up were jailed, disappeared, and/or shot on the spot as a lesson to the rest of them. The thing is-the reason that the tactic worked is because it is a lot like police brutality. If people just see what’s going on, back away, and leave, yeah, the brutality will continue. But if the people start pulling out cellphones and making videos, we start having cases like George Floyd’s where we have at least three officers going to prison for his murder. People got involved and then they stood up in court. That’s important.
We have the opportunity now to make a difference by voting these B******* out of office before they totally ruin our country. We can stand up to them. We can speak out. We can show the whole world that we’re not afraid of them anymore. We’re taking their pictures, recording their voices, and we will testify what they were doing. It was wrong and we are going to make it right.
Are you with me?
Vote Blue this year and from now on. Vote BLUE IN 2022.
My name is Ellen Wright, candidate for Georgia State Senate D29.
The English language has some rather strange ways it does its verbs. One boy in my sibling’s class was asked to do the verb “to freeze”. He thought he had the perfect answer: “freeze, froze, frizen”. He was completely mystified when the class erupted in laughter.
“Woke” is the simple past tense of “wake”. It can also be an adjective (this is where the right wing folks get bent out of shape) meaning to have an active awareness of systemic social injustices and prejudices, especially those involving the treatment of social, ethnic, or racial minorities. Which explains why they choose to use the term “woke” in a disparaging way to describe liberal or progressive groups who try to foster understanding, social justice, immigration reform, Black Lives Matter, criminal justice reform, etc.
Guess I have been “woke” for years and didn’t know it. Who knew?
It’s fine with me. They try to put me down by saying I’m a LIBERAL DEMOCRAT too. Sometimes I beat them to it. That’s fun because it takes the wind right out of their sails. I’ll just add the “woke” to it. I like playing in their heads.
Being “woke” is a good thing. Being a “liberal” is a good thing. Wanting a better world not just for yourself, but for your neighbors and community is a better thing. Don’t ever let them make you feel less than because of a label. Stand up and stand proud. We are Democrats and we are trying to make the entire country better for everyone INCLUDING THEM and in spite of them. Don’t ever forget that.
I’m Ellen Wright candidate for State Senate D29 Georgia. Vote Blue for our Democracy. Help keep our Senate Majority. Help FLIP OUR STATE EVEN BLUER. WE CAN DO THIS. PROTECT OUR WOMEN. THANK YOU FOR GOING TO VOTE.
I don’t know what your reasons for voting might be or even if they are on this particular card. I know I have a couple that missed this one. But I would be content with these, too. I could probably fill up another card, though.
The point here is that whether you are a single issue voter, e.g. you want gun violence reduced, or transgendered kids protected in schools, you will go vote FOR SURE, or if you are passionate about two or three or all of them (guilty as charged), you will not only vote but take other people to the polls, encourage other people to vote, knock on doors, and help register people to vote. YOU ARE COMMITTED.
For that, you get BINGO for only one square or however many you can get. My game is a lot easier than the usual one. What’s the prize? The satisfaction of knowing that you did your civic part, your participated, and you told the ‘powers that be’ what YOU think and want.
Now you know how to get their attention. Keep it up. March into their offices and tell them to their faces. Write letters. Get on the phone, tell their staff, and leave your name and address because they need to know you are a constituent and will hold them accountable. (This is NOT the time to do the anonymous thing.) Just don’t use profanity or obscenities. Word of advice: Only one topic and keep it short. No ranting.
I hope you picked a winner to vote for. I really hope it was me. But no matter who it turns out to be, keep working on keeping politicians accountable. Democracy does indeed die in darkness. We have to keep exposing the lies, the corruption, and the links to foreign influencers (like Putin) that want to destroy our country. Resistance is vital to our success.
Early voting is almost over. Election Day is almost here.
VOTE BLUE FOR DEMOCRACY. VOTE FOR YOUR VALUES. VOTE TO SAVE OUR COUNTRY. VOTE BLUE TO PROTECT WOMEN’S RIGHTS. VOTE BEFORE THE REPUBLICANS TAKE IT AWAY FROM US.
I’m Ellen Wright, candidate for State Senate D29 in Georgia.
I intentionally left this rather bare for a reason.
Our choice right now is pretty stark. Either we get off our hind ends and go to the polls and vote for people who will defend the rights of women…or you don’t care enough about your sisters, mothers, and daughters to do anything to defend them.
It’s really black and white.
There isn’t much in life that is, but this is. Now I’m not saying that you have to be “PRO-abortion” because you do not have to do that. What I am asking for is that you stand up for being PRO-CHOICE. There’s a big difference.
Abortion is a word that covers a lot of ground. In simple terms, it means to remove or terminate a pregnancy. However, that really makes it TOO simple. The decision is one that is never easy. It is always emotional. It can be fraught with spiritual overtones. It can throw the person into a psychological and emotional whirlwind that can last for lifetime. All of this plus the medical issues that can arise make this something that gets very complicated very fast. In short, not the kind of thing that you want a lot of people sticking their oars in. But here we are with the ENTIRE COUNTRY discussing what should be only between a doctor and patient.
Yes, the possibility exists that it might be used as a form of birth control. That’s an unlikely probability though considering that the other options are so widely available and that the cramping caused by the drugs are somewhat more severe than a normal menstrual cycle. Plus there’s the cost involved which is much higher than preventing pregnancies in the first place. So that argument just doesn’t make much sense.
A very real issue is the number of women who are irregular in their cycles so they will not know they are pregnant until they are well beyond the 6 or 10 week limits. These women may only have a period every three months (or more). They aren’t expecting a period so how are they to gauge whether or not they have “missed” a period? (I’ve known women who didn’t know they were pregnant until they came in to deliver! That’s how irregular they were.) These ignorant people sitting in the legislatures and courts saying that the law needs to be “thus and so” with black and white rules do not understand the vagaries of the human reproductive system. It simply does NOT always follow the rules. Mostly it does, but not always. That means making laws for “mostly” will mean that the outliers will be lawbreakers through no fault of their own. I know because I was one of them.
I’ve written on here before about the fact that the ability to make this choice is about the mother’s CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS. I believe that strongly. Her rights supersede that of any supposed rights of an embryo or fetus. I think we’ve allowed our imaginations to take over our reason when the “magic” of DNA first became public knowledge. I know it did me. I took the bait, hook, line, and sinker. My major in college was Biology. I was fascinated with the video of cells’ nuclei dividing with the chromosomes sliding across and the new cell membranes forming. Then electron microscopy arrived and we could see the exact instant of fertilization! So exciting! So it was understandable for preachers across America (indeed around the world) to mount their pulpits and declare that “we can now see for ourselves when life begins.” Except that it doesn’t.
What we see is the biological process at work. Two gametes that come together and make a single cell with a full complement of chromosomes that may or may not result in a new life. We do not know that it will or that it will not. Only thing we know for sure is that the possibility exists. That alone does not constitute the “beginning of life”. Possibilities abound everywhere. There’s a possibility that I could go buy the winning Powerball ticket and become a billionaire this week. But the chances of that actually happening are somewhere around 1 to 403 million. I have a better chance of being struck by lightning, getting into a car crash, or falling in my bathroom. My point is simple: science does not know when life begins. Medicine does not know when life begins. Every holy writing on the planet is written by men who romanticize the idea in countless ways, but none of them actually pinpoint the beginning of life.
So why do these pulpit pounders think they have a corner on that knowledge? Beats me.
I do think they are being used by some people really could not care less about which religion you say you follow. What these folks want is for women to be suppressed and oppressed because there is no such thing as a country that can be controlled by an authoritarian regime where the women are active in the government, commerce, and society. It doesn’t exist. We are a HUGE THREAT to them.
How to keep us down? Keep us pregnant, uneducated, and at home. They thought it would work in Iran (but the women there are proving them wrong. ) They thought keeping Egyptian women home would work, but no. In India, the patriarchy tries to control women with gang rapes. Child marriage is a problem throughout the world including right here in the USA. How much of this violence towards women and girls are you willing to condone? Part of this is done by FORCING PREGNANCY upon us.
You have a voice. Your vote is your voice on how we handle this. Do you want to defend the Rights of women to make these very personal decisions about their own lives and their own bodies for themselves? Or do you want a bunch of ignorant old men making that choice for your wife, your daughter, your granddaughter, or your sister?
Choose.
VOTE BLUE TO SAVE DEMOCRACY. VOTE BLUE TO SAVE OUR RIGHTS. VOTE BLUE TO SAVE OUR COUNTRY AND OUR FREEDOMS.
Sitting home is the action of a coward. We need the bravery of patriots and people who care. I’m Ellen Wright and I want to be your voice in the Georgia Senate. Follow my website and my Facebook and Instagram accounts. LIKE and SHARE my posts.
Democrats have historically played the role of the Mr/Ms Nice People. We have been the ones who bent over backwards to be civil. We were asked to be bi-partisan and meet in the middle. But the “middle” kept moving away from us, so we would oblige dutifully and shuffle along after it. Until finally, FINALLY, some folks started to get smart about this. (I’m not sure exactly who, but seems to me Bernie Sanders may have been in on it. Al Gore most likely was another, and a few others.) When they did, the whole crowd began to wake up.
We were acting like that frog in the pot of water on the stove. You know the story. Throw the frog into the pot and increase the heat gradually and the frog won’t notice until it is too late. Well, we almost didn’t. We still might not have. This election and 2024 will tell the tale.
Did we get out of the hot water in time?
We’ll know when the votes are counted.
We absolutely MUST hold the House AND the Senate. If possible, we need to make GAINS in the number of seats held in both. That’s a tall order for a mid-term election.
In addition, we need to FLIP some state governor races and as many executive seats as possible, especially Secretary of State and Attorney General. Georgia is critical.
Then there are the state legislatures. We really need to make gains there to stave off these runs at abortion bans and other draconian laws.
We really, really have our work cut out for us. It’s not a joke when we say we need to vote like we are Ukrainians. We are going to have to fight the enemy within our country just a ferociously as they are fighting Russia. Let’s just hope to God this doesn’t turn to actual bloodshed.
Right now, it’s time to VOTE BLUE. Please take everybody you can find to the polls and get them to vote. We need every vote possible. It takes every drop of water to make a BLUE WAVE happen.
I’m Ellen Wright and I’m running for the GA State Senate D29. wright4georgia.com Follow my website and my facebook and instagram pages. LIKE and Share my posts.
Halloween is not my “thing”. I just have never gotten the point of the whole thing. But then I don’t do circuses and clowns either (at least the Barnum and Bailey kind. Cirque du Soleil-yeah, I can get into those.) Scary masks, pranks, and boo-ing people, though? Nyah. I’ll meet you over at the hot chocolate.
But this? Now this scares the life out of me. Over the span of 40 years, these people have carefully crafted a means of taking over our hearts and minds to the point where a large portion of our VOTING POPULATION BELIEVES THEIR LIES.
However, and this is big, they are still a MINORITY of the people registered to vote. Not kidding.
Here’s the catch:
Most of the population DOES NOT VOTE AT ALL.
Of the ones who are registered to vote, MOST WILL SIT ON THEIR ASSES AT HOME. THEY WILL DO NOTHING.
If, and it is a very big IF, we can get all of the registered Democrats to go vote, WE WOULD WIN IN A LANDSLIDE.
Even better? Getting the entire nation to register to vote. Studies have shown that if that happened, the Democrats would run the entire country and we wouldn’t even have a national debt. But that’s, I’m sorry to say, only a dream you wish you didn’t have to wake up from. Oh, well.
The Republican party is now being run openly by white nationalists (fascists). That means they will institute misogynistic policies (e.g. national abortion bans), racist (re-instituting police raids on no-knock warrants, stop-search, arrests for drinking/walking while black, etc), more detainee seizures and deportations, reversal of same sex marriages, lifting protection for trans/LGBTQ people, banning mixed race marriages, and more. At some point, they WILL institute a ban on personal firearm ownership. (Can’t have the populace rise up against your draconian laws with weapons, can you?) And those are just for starters.
Never trust a group that spouts religion as a way of gaining power. They are hyenas in wolves’ skins in sheep’s skins.
Watch for them. You can see them. Some are easier to spot than others. But they are there.
That’s why you need to vote BLUE in this election and in every election for the foreseeable future until we can get rid of these people and what they represent for our country. Help me get to the Georgia Senate to help work on it there. It won’t be easy, but I have never shied away from hard. Let’s keep Georgia strong, moving forward, and get more jobs, affordable housing for workers and their families, better public schools, and better healthcare options. We can do this-but you have to vote blue!
I’m Ellen Wright running for State Senate District 29. Follow this website and my Facebook and Instagram pages. LIKE and SHARE these posts.
If the male gender was responsible for that end of reproduction, you can bet the farm that we wouldn’t be facing this climate crisis, New York City’s streets would be nearly clear of cars and buses, and we wouldn’t be having this big fight right now. However, such is not the case.
(I’m still of the opinion that every male needs to either witness a birth or do the electrode pads on the stomach to simulate labor thing. Why? Because they do not have a effing clue and I think that’s part of this callous disregard for women. It’s not because I have it in for the guys. I don’t. I just don’t think they understand and they need to.)
We females have had to put up with more snide comments from men (and some women which really is shameful-they are trying to make points with the guys or a power play, but only manage to come off as petty witches) about being “moody”, “on the rag”, or some such remark. It’s immature and asinine to say the least. Their moods vary as well, but they have no discernable reason for it. Are we allowed to make mention of it? Oh, no, of course not. So I propose we all grow up and act like adults.
That’s the other thing with this abortion issue. The whole thing is really, when you get down to it, like a child at a birthday party saying “well, I don’t like strawberry ice cream so NOBODY can have strawberry ice cream!” Excuse me? Since when did one person make the decision for the entire group? This is a matter of individual Freedoms and Rights-of speech to say what she wants for her own future, her own economic destiny, her own body, of medical privacy for her healthcare information to be held in strict confidence between her and her providers, of religion to be able to practice hers in her own way regardless of how others may or may not feel about her choices, and of the right to pursue her own path to happiness in her own way.
They are using a pseudo-science by saying that the meeting of two gametes and the fusing of two sets of DNA constitutes the beginning of Life (big L). That is not what the Science community itself recognizes and never has. They merely call it “fertilization” and let it go. The reason is because at that level, microscopically, you cannot make the distinction of what sort of animal that zygote is supposed to become. Human, dog, elephant, reptile? You can’t tell. Truly, until well on up into development, the blastocyst, embryo, then fetus is unrecognizable as even being human. Those people want to call it things that it simply is not including an independent life. Medical science does not recognize it until it reaches the point of what is termed “viability”.
“Viability” comes when the lung sacs are capable of expanding fully and exchanging CO2 for O2 efficiently. This does not occur until approximately the 32nd week of pregnancy. Any woman who delivers between 32-36 weeks is considered to have a early baby-not an abortion. Earlier than 30-32 weeks is a premature delivery, but NOT AN ABORTION. Any earlier than that is a judgement call by the attending and the mom. It is so risky for both mom and fetus.
The government has no business in the Labor and Delivery suites. Old men who have never had cramps, used tampons, sanitary napkins, menstrual cups, left pools of blood on their chairs, stained their clothes, or had the migraines should not have one syllable to say in this. Until they have, they need to sit down and shut the hell up. The courts most assuredly do not. Same reasons. I’m tired of laws written by patriarchs who have no idea.
Damn. You men make the messes, then you can’t even clean them up. Then men like Herschel Walker can’t even lie well. Get out of our way. We’re done. We brought every one of you into the world and we can take your pricks out. The women are coming.
VOTE BLUE FROM TOP TO BOTTOM. VOTE TO SAVE DEMOCRACY. VOTE TO PROTECT OUR RIGHTS. VOTE TO SAVE OUR COUNTRY. My name is Ellen Wright and I am running for State Senate D29.
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That’s what you would “druther” be doing instead of what you are doing. Now does it make sense?
I’ve been grown for too long to think that just because I make a list that I’m going to be able to deliver on it Immediately if not sooner or maybe at all. BUT, you are entitled to know what I would want to do if given the chance. That’s fair.
These are all very tall orders. I have no illusions that they would be cheap, fast, or easy to implement. One of the things I learned as a middle manager was this: you have three things that all stakeholders want and they are: low cost, fast turnaround, and high profitability. But here’s the catch. You can only have two out of the three. Invariably, my stakeholders wanted all three. But it doesn’t work that way. Only 2 out of 3 are allowed. Decisions.
I am trying to tell you that somebody somewhere along the line is not going to be happy with the decision to prioritize one of these above the others. I get that. There’s always somebody left out because there isn’t room in the budget.
As of right now, I would have to go with protecting our women first. It’s the most flagrant attack on our Constitutional Rights that I have ever seen. That is a critical and crucial move that will literally mean saving women’s lives. I worked in hospitals with Labor and Delivery units and neonatal ICUs. I’ve seen what happens and I was only in/out as a lab tech. I’ve had too many friends suffer miscarriages and fetal deaths. I cannot, in good faith to them, my nieces, and other members of my own family, not support that first.
The other four? I truly don’t know. They are all important. Perhaps they are equally important. If that’s true, somebody hand me a quarter. I’ll flip it and do it that way.
One thing for sure, though, you will get your money’s worth out of me. I never do anything at less than 150% or more. It’s always all in.
State Senator for District 29. I’m Ellen Wright running as a Democrat to serve you.
VOTE BLUE WHEN YOU GET YOUR BALLOT FROM TOP TO BOTTOM. PROTECT THE WOMEN YOU LOVE WHEN YOU VOTE.
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People right now kind of know that Rev. Raphael Warnock is one of their U. S. Senators. It’s all over the news that he’s running for re-election and who his opponent is. Hard to miss if you want to know the truth. Rev. Warnock is everything you would want in a Senator white, black, or pink polka dotted. I do feel pity for Walker being used like this, but he’s a grown man. He is not, in any sense of the word, qualified to be a Senator.
However, with rare exceptions, it is unusual for most residents of the area to be able to tell you who their STATE Senator or Legislators are. Most don’t even know what district they reside in. That’s pretty much true regardless of whether or not they usually vote one way or the other. Doesn’t say much for the communication being done, does it? How in the heck do you expect people to get involved in their own governance if you don’t keep them informed?
Oh, I get it-we are supposed to treat them like mushrooms and keep them in the dark. I This is the theory that says that the elected officials “know best for the voters” and the voters don’t need to know what is going on until the legislation is signed into law when it is too late for them to protest or influence the course of events. Well, maybe I’m nuttier than a trainload of Claxton fruitcakes, but I have never thought much of that idea. Elected officials are supposed to be servants of the people, not the other way around. My thoughts are bound to chafe some folks like beach sand in their swim trunks but they’ll just have to live with it. I’m like that.
I intend to keep people as informed as I possibly can. The way I want to do this is through public town halls, articles in our newspapers, and interviews on our radio stations. I have seen our current Senator in photo ops–in Marietta, in civic clubs that only well-to-do folks can go to, and board meetings of big businesses. I’ve never seen anything about him meeting with just plain old folks. Maybe he does and I just have missed it. But you’d think people would know his name.
I’m Ellen Wright. Look at the page that talks about who I am. Read more of my posts to find out what I’m all about. I want District 29 to thrive and flourish but to do so from the bottom up. We need affordable housing for workers, small businesses need supporting, public schools need to be improved. our infrastructure needs work, healthcare must be improved, and we have to restore our women’s rights to determine their own future’s. Help me get to the place where I can help you.
VOTE BLUE FROM TOP TO BOTTOM. VOTE BLUE TO DEFEND OUR DEMOCRACY. VOTE BLUE TO RESTORE THE RIGHTS OF OUR WOMEN AND GIRLS. VOTE VOTE VOTE.
Follow my website and my Facebook and Instagram accounts. LIKE and SHARE to your family and friends. Let’s get this done.
There’s just no other way to put it. The so-called “pro-life” people are actually foisting off a religious belief that they have on everyone else and trying to make it the law of the entire country. There is NO science to back them up. No medical discoveries that they can point to. It is just a collection of cherry-picked scriptures out of their holy writings and pseudo-scientific arguments. I have news for them. Not everybody accepts the validity of either or both. When it comes right down to it, if that is what you choose to believe, then practice it yourself. But, in the name of all that you believe is holy, do NOT attempt to foist it off on anyone else. If they choose to follow your example, that’s one thing. But trying to FORCE your beliefs on others as a matter of LAW? That’s not right.
In short, your right to your religious beliefs end where my body begins. I choose what goes on inside of my skin. Not you. If you don’t like that, well, go home and do whatever it is you do.
Similarly, religious beliefs do not have a place in the locker room, restroom, county clerk’s office, or any other place where some nosy person wants to know what is on your birth certificate as your assigned gender, in your pants as your external genitalia, how you choose your pronouns, or who you choose to spend your life with. It’s, really and truly, none of their freaking business. As my dad used to say, “If you find yourself asking that question, remind yourself it really doesn’t matter.” He was right. It doesn’t.
Abortion rights are everybody’s rights. It is not “just about women’s reproductive rights”. Yes, some other people can get pregnant. (I know that is jarring to some, but it is true.) They need medical care. Also men need reproductive care and the people who oppose abortion are speaking about banning vasectomies and condoms for guys. They want to ban all over the counter birth control-spermicide jellies/creams, diaphragms, cups, O-rings, etc. They want to stop physicians from implanting the long term Nexplanon, IUDs, and other methods. They want to go after the IVF clinics and sperm donors. There is no end to this if we do not stop them NOW. Everyone will be affected. Those who do not want a pregnancy and those who desperately want a family will be hit by their religious beliefs.
The “good” thing is this-they are a minority. We do outnumber them and, if we get to the polls, we can stop them. But sitting down and waiting for somebody else to do it just is not an option.
YOU MUST GO VOTE. YOU MUST VOTE BLUE. VOTE BLUE TOP TO BOTTOM. SAVE OUR FREEDOMS AND RIGHTS. And thank you.
Voters to the “right” of the spectrum love to moan and groan about the prices at the gas pump. I’m not thrilled with them either. (I just filled up myself. OUCH!) I’m well aware of inflation, thank you very much, but you have to wonder if those folks EVER look at what is going on in the rest of the world and can actually apply it to what is happening to their lives? It certainly does not appear that they can or do. I am not certain which it is. Or maybe they just blindly mouth off what their propagandists say and never do any critical thinking at all? Now there’s a very real possibility.
Despite appearances to the contrary, just about all of the people in Congress (there are notable exceptions) are reasonably intelligent people. Some are very bright which really makes explaining what they do versus what they say quite the challenge. So if they are really concerned about the price at the pumps, the price of food at the grocery stores, and the prices of other commodities, why in the heck did they completely and totally refuse to even consider a ‘windfall profits’ tax on the companies that are GOUGING the consumers and raking in money like a dealer raking in betting chips at a table in Vegas?
I’ll tell you why.
A. Republicans are, without a doubt, the wealthiest people in Congress. It is no secret that they go to Washington to get those seats for the insider trading secrets, and, boy, do they use them. Very few come home broke. (Nathan Deal of Georgia managed to do it, but he cashed in some political capital, got himself elected Governor of the state for two terms, and retired a multi-millionaire.) They buy stock in the companies that come to them for ‘FAVORABLE’ legislation. (That’s another bone to pick, and I won’t do it now.)
B. Companies send lobbyists (high-priced law firms) to Washington to influence the revamping of existing laws and creation of new ones. In fact, Congress very seldom actually writes a piece of legislation any more. These law firms do it for them then shop it around until they find a politician willing to sponsor it-often without having read it. The politician, in return, will make sure that the company, who paid the law firm, is protected from any “adverse” laws (like the ‘windfall taxes”) that might come up. When he can do that, golly gee, lookee there, big checks appear in his campaign coffers. Now how did that happen?
In the process, the respective party puts out a defensive line that the party in power is actually the one “responsible” for the “outrageous prices” and “inflation” in spite of solid evidence to the contrary AND THAT THEY ARE ACTUALLY CASHING IN ON. It’s indirect, but they are.
Long story short, who is actually to blame for these prices? The oil/gas barons directly and the Republicans indirectly is the correct answer. What’s their excuse? The war in Ukraine with Russia that they want us out of because the oil companies profit tremendously from their deals with the Russian government to explore and drill in the wastelands of Siberia. They were told to come home and they’re mad about it. Therefore, this is their way of getting back at our government for that. Instead of being good Americans, they want to play Putin’s game (the wells really ARE his) and pay him lots of money so they can make money. Don’t tell me EXXON and Rex Tillerson and all the rest are such patriots. They’re not. They’re money grubbing people who serve Putin. When you know the background, it makes you angry.
Biden and his administration have NOTHING to do with the prices we’re seeing other than supporting Ukraine which is the right thing to do.
The OIL/GAS companies are the ones who are making this happen. If you want to complain, then complain to your REPUBLICAN officials, your news media outlets, and, yes, to them. LOUDLY. OFTEN. PUBLICLY.
In the meantime, VOTE BLUE TOP TO BOTTOM 2022. SLAVI UKRAINE. VOTE TO SAVE DEMOCRACY. VOTE TO SUPPORT WOMEN’S RIGHTS. VOTE TO PUT FASCISM DOWN. VOTE TO OVERCOME HATE.
I spent 25 years of my life learning how to make everything I did conform to the rules and regulations of not one but several government agencies. I was darn good at doing it, too. Now one of the things that most people do not realize is that these Rules and Regulations have the force of law. That’s right. You can get into some very serious hurt by breaking or trying to go around these words in black and white on some Federal or State paper. Usually, it is something like the withdrawal of funding or the paying back of funding you have already received.
Example: if you run afoul of the HHS, they will go back and find out when was the last time that you were in compliance with their rule that you messed up on. Then they will calculate how many Medicare patients you have seen since then. Then they will fine you per patient per day until all the money you got during that time is paid back PLUS 3x the amount in damages. As you can imagine, NOBODY wants to pay that kind of money because it is often in the MILLIONS of dollars.
These departments have considerable clout. They know it and you know it. You work your ever-loving rear end off to make certain that you stay on their good side. I never had a problem. My bosses loved that about me. Being able to read the law and put it into practice is a gift.
HOWEVER, it is costly. I will not lie to you. My skill and expertise do not come without a price and putting what is necessary into place is also not cheap. That is why many business owners HATE Rules and Regulations. They feel-I think erroneously-that these laws are meant mostly to hinder them from making profits and to stifle capitalism. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The intent of Rules and Regulations is to enforce the laws passed by Congress and signed by the President. Those are necessarily somewhat vague. The various Cabinet Departments then take those laws and “promulgate” (which means clarify and determine) exactly how those laws might be put into practice in real life. It takes time and there is a process in which the proposed rules and regulations are put into something called the Federal Register for public comments. This might happen several times as they are rewritten. (I have put in my two cents on a few things in the past. The system does work.)
After that is finished, the Rules and Regulations come out in finished form. The public comment period is over. The only thing left is the moaning and groaning as the changes go into effect.
Now-how did we get the Health and Safety laws? Ever hear of something called OSHA? That’s the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and it used to have a lot more power at the federal level than it does now, sorry to say. When it was first created, it was going to help PREVENT climate change, clean up hazardous waste sites, make factories safe to work in, warehouses places where people didn’t fall out with heat exhaustion, and just a whole bunch more. It was marvelous. The Democrats, the unions, and the environmentalists were ecstatic. Then the Republicans came back into the majority and started weakening it.
First thing they did was to pull its teeth by giving most of its enforcement power to the states. Then they began work on the ‘unnecessary’ regulations on the various industries such as tight emissions controls on vehicles and gasoline standards. It’s gone on like that ever since.
The truth is-rules and regulations are formulated to PROTECT THE CONSUMER FROM THE BIG BUNESS MOGULS. If you look at them that way, they make perfect sense. The number thing the Big Business folks want is–PROFITS. What do Rules and Regulations do? Spend money that they see could be going into their bottom lines.
But if you are a consumer? What do Rules and Regulations do? They ensure that the products that you buy are safe, the quality remains high, that conditions inside the plants are safe for the workers, and the environment in which you live remains healthy and unpolluted.
It’s a matter of priorities. I prefer the last one and I hope you do, too. That’s why I’m asking you to vote for me. I want to help make and renew laws that protect you and your family. Vote Blue in 2022.
If this was 49.9% or 50.1%, I’d understand the confusion. But it most definitely is not. These people are intent on FORCING their religious beliefs down the throats of EVERYONE in violation of our Constitutional Rights on not one, but FOUR different Amendments.
This is OUTRAGEOUS.
Let me list the ways that this is violating my rights AND yours, because if they succeed doing this, they WILL move to rip up more of our hard-earned freedoms and take us back to the 16th century. Men, pay attention. This involves you as well.
First Amendment: A. Freedom of Speech – they want to restrict our right to protest openly and in public. To do this, they would take away our right to carry signs in the street, hold protests in front of public buildings, or hold protests in front of government offices. (Note: Senator Robertson introduced such a bill just this spring to the GA Senate. It failed to get consideration this year, but that doesn’t mean it won’t come up again.) They also want to restrict our ability to say what our futures might be as far as careers or education by making sure that we stay home to care for children and homes.
B. Freedom of Religion – this is being violated because their belief that “life begins at conception” is a religious belief, not a medical or scientific fact. That means that they are using this as a pretext to force their religion down the throats of Jews, atheists, Hindus, agnostics, Muslims, and just people who disagree with them. The exact definition of when LIFE begins has never been scientifically delimited and their belief should not be used to force any compliance to an artificial standard of medical care.
Privacy – You are guaranteed by law that your healthcare information cannot be divulged or used except to other providers of your healthcare or to pay your bills. So why is the government using that information to say that you MUST remain pregnant? Or will they start saying that you have to GET pregnant? Or that a man cannot or should get a vasectomy? Why is it the government’s business anyway? What’s next? Are they going to start playing God and telling you who to breed with? Now THAT was something Hitler did.
Discrimination – on the basis of gender, skin color, economics, sexual preference, ethnicity, or any other criteria is supposed to be illegal. But anti-abortion laws are de facto discrimination because WOMEN OVER THE INCOME LEVEL OF $180k/YEAR will get their abortions regardless. It just doesn’t matter for them. That has always been true. They do not have those “inconvenient” babies. Poor women do. That fact is what helps keep poor women poor, too.
Now, gents, I’ve been writing about women, but let me tell you why this applies to you as well. If those people can suddenly rip the rights from 50% of the population, what makes you think that your rights are sacred? They are openly talking about reversing the laws regarding gay marriages, interracial marriages, women voting, and credit laws that allow people of color to get loans for homes. Probably they will try to remove voting from Black and brown Americans at some point if they can.
Want to help stop this idiocy? Vote for Democrats in 2022 and 2024. Stay involved in your LOCAL politics-city/county and state. Teach those children that voting is sacred and that every vote counts.
We must not lose. Because if we lose, we’ll lose our country. We have to fight.
One of the things that has been frustrating me for a while now is the people who want to make “allowances” for these folks who insist on being, well, flat-out cruel and evil are the only two words I can come up with. When you are trying to make children who cannot legally consent to their own healthcare decisions become mothers to MORE children, withhold nutrition from the children already here, take away the safety net for the elderly (Social Security), endanger the healthcare of MILLIONS (Medicare/Medicaid), AND trying to uproot the Affordable Care Act completely without anything viable to replace ANY of it, that’s pretty much the very definition of cruel and evil.
I, quite frankly, do not see the point in trying to cajole, baby-talk, or shame people who obviously have no conscience, morals, or ethics. They are beyond that and it is a TOTAL waste of time.
You go do what you need to do. And what we need to do is stop them by all means possible. The first step is to SHOW UP AT THE POLLS.
I know that sounds like: well, DUH. Or can’t you think of something more original to say than that? But it is true. When we have people like Herschel Walker–a guy who thinks a toy badge meant to thrill a small child is actually real and making him a “real live police officer” running for the U.S. Senate; Brainless Brian Kemp, a man who has obdurately refused to expand Medicaid for poor Georgians and caused literally thousands of them to sicken and die of Covid19 because they couldn’t afford care and who wants to deny 50% of women in the state their basic CONSTITUTIONAL rights TO DECIDE IF THEY WANT ACCESS to abortion healthcare;Drew Ferguson, who supports the national abortion ban and who SIGNED ON to the overturning of the 2020 election of President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris;Burt Jones, who actually WAS one of the fake Republican electors who was going to represent Georgia and help overturn the 2020 election in defiance of the will of the voters of Georgia (a VERY UNAMERICAN thing to do!); and Randy Robertson, a Georgia State Senator who helped change Georgia’s election laws in 2021 IN SPITE OF the fact that the election was deemed extraordinarily free of errors or fraud by the Republican Secretary of State, Ben Raffensperger, to make it harder to vote and easier for the General Assembly to arbitrarily remove county election boards if “the election results are deemed unsatisfactory and replace them with members chosen by the General Assembly to make such changes in the elections as deemed proper” (meaning your vote doesn’t count AT ALL) AND he tried to make the exercise of your First Amendment right of free speech by protesting in the street illegal, we have simply GOT TO TURN OUT AND PREVENT THESE PEOPLE FROM EVER SITTING IN POWER OVER US EVER AGAIN. Now I know that was a lot to read and understand. Take your time and go back if you have to. It will be worth it.
Not every Democrat will be a genius at the job. That’s a given. Some will even be pretty lousy at it. But I promise you one thing: Democrats are a LOT better at shoving the garbage out the back door than the Republicans are. Sometimes we even shove out things just because they look like they “might” be questionable. Now compare that to the Republicans with KNOWN pedophiles, Medicare fraud, slum lords, PPP grant grifters, inside traders, adulterers, etc. Yeah, buddy, and “they” claim to be the party of family values and Christian conservatism? I’m finding it very hard to see. I even cleaned my microscope.
After you vote in this election, DO NOT SIT DOWN.
This is crucial. It will be very tempting, but don’t do it. We need people to remain motivated, (frankly) mad as hell, and deeply involved. Why? Because these folks have been working on this for at least 40 years while we’ve been coasting. Democrats were told (by somebody, I don’t know who, but I want to at least slap them) that we needed to work in a “civilized, bipartisan manner” and play nice. Yeah? Well, they either didn’t tell the Republicans or they WERE Republicans. I strongly suspect the latter. Because every time there was an opportunity to “compromise”, they moved the “middle” a little further back towards THEM. The funny thing was, instead of calling them out on it and demanding they play by the rules, Democrats LET THEM because we were “playing nice”. I absolutely despise “PLAYING NICE”. Always have. (Reason? It’s dishonest. It really is. You are forcing one side to make concessions in behavior that they don’t want to make to appease the other side solely for the other side’s benefit. There is no benefit for the party making the concessions.) We need to stay aware of what is going on in our communities, counties, and states BECAUSE THAT AFFECTS US DIRECTLY. If we go back to sleep, we won’t know.
Local elections will be held next year. This will be city and town things primarily. There might be a few special elections or referendums in there as well. Watch for these and make sure you vote in them.
2024 Presidential, Senate, Congressional, and some State elections will start gearing up in 2023. We don’t know yet if Joe Biden will run again. We don’t know yet if the Orange Defeated Former Fake will attempt a comeback, but even if he is in prison, he will affect what they do. For the next 40 years and maybe further, we will have to continue to find fascism, white nationalism, and authoritarian groups who want to destroy our country from the INSIDE. The enemy is not Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, or immigrants. A long-dead cartoonist said it best:
Walt Kelly drew ‘Pogo’ for many years. I grew up reading and enjoying the strip. It was my “Doonesbury” as it was scathing political satire at times. He skewered LBJ, McCarthy, Goldwater, and all the bigwigs of the time with impunity without leaving the Okefenokee Swamp, a place the man himself had never visited. His insight was incredible. “We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us”.
What do we do and where do we go from here? Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, we cannot go back and there’s no path we can see. We can only pray, jump, and do the best we can with what we’ve got, Lord willing. But you have to show up. That’s the important part.
Show up. Take part. Speak your mind. VOTE BLUE. Rinse, repeat.
Back when Lynn Westmoreland was the Congressman around here and Johnny Isakson was our Senator, I’d write and call to try to get answers to questions I had. Silence. Nothing from either one. But I did just happen to write to a Congressman in some other state, I think it was in Oregon, and danged if I didn’t get a letter back two weeks later. The difference? He was a Democrat. Now I wasn’t even one of his voters. He wasn’t duty bound to answer me. I certainly wasn’t expecting him to. I WAS hoping that Westmoreland and Isakson’s staff had the common decency to at least send a boilerplate letter. But noooooo.
That was when my husband and I were still living in Coweta County. Since then, I’ve gotten more and more vocal in federal, state, and local matters. It is consistent across the board. Republicans do not reply to the average voter. EVER.I don’t know when they came to the conclusion that the voters who put them in office were just necessary nuisances, but they treat them like toilet paper, e.g. useful when needed, but once used, highly forgettable. I refuse to be toilet paper.
I refuse to treat other people like toilet paper, even when they are obnoxious. (I learned that skill working in healthcare. People are rarely glad to see you when you walk in the door carrying needles and talking about blood, urine, and poop. They just aren’t.) I want to hear what is on their minds.
And when we moved down here, our Representative in the Georgia General Assembly, Bob Trammell, was amazingly responsive. That was in spite of the fact that he was the Democratic Whip at the time and must have been very busy. But our State Senator then and since have been Republican, and you can’t get a peep out of either one. The guy who defeated Bob? I see him around once in awhile, but that’s only when campaigning. Not very responsive either.
Those “new” Democratic Senators, Ossoff and Warnock? They have responded to every email, Tweet, and call I’ve ever sent to them. They are both out in the state asking questions and listening to people in between campaigning. I got ONE call from David Perdue while he was in office. His staffer wanted to know what I thought about something Perdue had said. So I told him and they never called back. Loeffler’s office never contacted me-ever. You feel like you are talking into black worm holes.
My view of elected officials is that they are PUBLIC SERVANTS. That is, the public citizens are their bosses and they owe the public a responsibility to “report” in on their activities, duties, and fiscal accountabilities just like they would working at any other job. They do not work for their campaign donors. I can see where it would be tempting to see it that way, particularly when the donations are large sums, but that where we need to get rid of allowing these PACs and corporations into politics. (That’s the fallacy of Citizens United.) If elected, the VOTERS would be my bosses ultimately. Campaign contributors are people who believed in me enough to help me get elected. I appreciate them, but I’m not for sale.
Want a Senator who will listen to you and talk to you? Here I am. Early voting is here. Election day is November 8. The choice is clear.
I’m not. I’m as serious as a heart attack followed by a quintuple bypass. The bastards (pardon me) have tried to lull us into complacency with this “let the states decide” about abortion rights” garbage. They WANT us to think that will be the sum total of the fight.
It most definitely will not be.
Why do I say that? Because they are determined to retake the House and the Senate to the point that they can pass a NATIONWIDE ABORTION BAN that will be VETO PROOF. If that fails in 2022, they will keep trying until they make it happen.
That is why we absolutely must keep the House and Senate. We really, really need to EXPAND our majority in both. It’s the only way to REVERSE much of what has happened and to PUT REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS INTO FEDERAL LAW.
And we need as many Democratic Governors, Lt. Governors, Attorneys General, Secretaries of State, and other top Executives in every state. Plus as many Democratic Senators and Legislators right down to the country and city levels. That is why we keep saying that we want voters to vote BLUE from the top to the bottom of the ballots.
How did this happen?
Years of allowing the Republicans to redistrict the voters into districts such that they virtually cannot lose unless the Democrats show up in FORCE. When that happens, even redistricting doesn’t work.
We CAN WIN. But we need you to do it.
Our RIGHTS depend on it. Calling on you to STAND UP, SHOW OUT, AND VOTE.
So go the lyrics of a song from the old Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof”, a story set in Russia about a family of Jews before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Its main theme is that we should enjoy and value life and each other each day as it comes because it is as unstable as a fiddler playing tunes on a tiled roof. There is much wisdom in this. You have to be aware of this instability and live in the moment and be willing to do the work to appreciate, love, let go of things that need to be let go, and keep what needs to be kept safe. Democracy takes work.
If we want to live in a democracy of any kind, then we have to exert the effort to make it work. It is very much like a marriage or parenthood in that respect. If you don’t work at it, you will lose it. It will go stale and the people in it will cease to care about it. When that happens, people drift apart. Conflicts start and before you know it, the ties are broken and it has been destroyed.
We have to participate, we have to vote, and we have to keep going from now on. Let’s start teaching our children in 4th/5th grade the real history of this country and why voting matters. Let’s teach them when women and black americans got the vote and why it is still hard for some people to gain access to the voting booth. Let’s get them fired up. We need that fire.
Do you want to continue to live in a democracy? Great, then vote in every election. Go to town halls, board of commissioners, elections, schools, zoning, recreation, etc. and find out what your officials are up to. Ask questions and let them know that you are watching them. It makes a difference. It really does.
Early voting is here. Election day is Nov. 8. Make your plan to vote. Don’t allow the sun to set before you have participated in the greatest means of government in the world.
Now this is, for a lot of people, a topic that they just cannot quite imagine much less accept as being the truth. I get it.
It is pretty cold-hearted to say the very least. After all, you are talking about humans as if they are cattle or dogs. That’s just frozen. It’s not even cold. It’s frozen.
However, this is a concept that has been around for years and years. Most notably, that nasty little man over in Germany actually had “breeding” farms of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish women set up for his SS commanders to start his Aryan “Super race”. The men were encouraged to visit as often as possible until their preferred women were pregnant. It is documented that people were told some years after WWII that they were the product of these camps. I cannot imagine that it was welcome news.
The theory behind this goes like this:
More babies overall is to the benefit of the nation as a whole.
More WHITE babies are to be encouraged as they are considered genetically superior. The Caucasian portion of the population is dwindling and this should be reversed.
Black/Brown/Asian/Native babies and those of mixed parentage will be the workers of our future and our military. They do not need to be given the social programs such as Head Start, SNAP, school meals, etc. because all they’ll ever do is the menial jobs and go to war. They are expendable. We will need more of them, but their care and education is a non-issue.
Forcing women to carry a pregnancy is a form of forcing ONE RELIGION on the entire country. This is a violation of the 1st Amendment.
Keeping women pregnant keeps them from being able to achieve higher educations and advancing into the higher levels in politics and business where they interfere with the ambitions of men.
If women can be forced to carry pregnancies, they can also be forced to terminate a pregnancy against their will (e.g. China). Or other rights could be terminated without notice or reasons.
It opens the door for saying who can have a pregnancy, by which man, when, and how many pregnancies. A woman becomes, essentially, livestock.
Women could be rounded up and simply given to groups of men as “wives” for breeding purposes like the schoolgirls in Liberia, Africa. When they were finally released or escaped, most of them had had at least two pregnancies by their captors.
Think this can’t happen in this world? It HAS HAPPENED and it could happen here if we let it.
These people who think this way are among us. They are extremists, for sure, but they are working to take over our country. Overturning Roe v Wade was merely a starting point.
We MUST STOP THEM. It has to be decisive and it has to be NOW. Then we have to build in safeguards so this will not happen again. Vote for your WIVES, DAUGHTERS, SISTERS, AND GRANDDAUGHTERS. Vote for the soul of your country. VOTE BLUE IN 2022.
And Vote for every Democrat you possibly can from now on. This is real.
One of my passions has always been an education for children, especially underprivileged children or children with some sort of problem. It probably stems from my own love of reading and sheer joy and fascination with all things science. (Though I will admit to shortcomings in math. But I blame that on what I now know are TERRIBLE math textbooks and math teachers who really don’t know how to teach the subject because they were taught incorrectly.) Learning SHOULD BE INCREDIBLY FUN. So I tend to get really, excuse the term, pissed off when people tell me that certain groups of people are ‘incapable of learning’ because of where they live, the color of their skin, blah, blah, blah. Got news for them. They are the ones who are probably incapable of learning because THEY CHOOSE NOT TO LEARN.
My dad had a problem with that, too. He used to say, “Ignorance can be cured by education, but intentional stupidity is permanent and inexcusable.” I agree. (If you want an attribution, it’s E. A. “Tommy” Thompson.)
Brian “Brainless” Kemp keeps emphasizing that “Georgia’s schools are doing great.” Compared to what exactly? He refuses to say. If all you are doing is comparing Georgia schools’ records from one year back to previous years, then, yeah, there is some improvement. Not a tremendous amount, but there is some. But to get a reliable picture, you do not compare yourself with yourself. You compare yourself along with OTHERS to a standard. That’s where Brian Kemp’s little measurement scheme falls to tatters. Here’s one.
Now this varies somewhat according to the source. My point here is not what state is on the list or how much they spend on the kids (although that’s interesting), but the fact that our state is NOT listed there. As a matter of fact, no matter which list you look at, Georgia is consistently ranking BELOW THE NUMBER 25 which means half the states or more do better than we do at educating children.Now Kemp might be trying to put a positive spin on the fact that the State has risen from being in the forties to being in the high thirties, but I’m not happy with that. It sounds rather like a kid you know is bright coming in the door and saying, “Hey, look, I raised my grade in History from a D minus to a D plus.” You don’t necessarily break out the brass bands and firecrackers for that, do you?
My view is that our children are simply being short-changed here. You CANNOT get a good education K-12 and beyond if you don’t get a good foundation to start with. Furthermore, the kids K-12 are being ripped off because THEY are not getting the technology training, up-to-date textbooks, nutrition (they are not being fed breakfast at home and eat miserable lunches), and physical education time (the more they sit, the less they learn.) Why has this happened?
Remember a certain President saying “No more taxes.” Yeah, well, that goes right along with “trickle-down” economics, my friends. You get what you pay for. You are just not going to get a Mercedes Benz on a Fiat budget, now are you? Or Saks Fifth Avenue couture wardrobes when all you have to spend will take you to either the Dollar Store or maybe Walmart. The same goes for education. When all that started, governors across the country started slashing budgets and education took big hits. Class sizes got bigger, teachers left and were not replaced, salaries were frozen/cut, some departments were cut out completely, and the kids suffered as a result. We have an entire generation now who cannot read, write properly, or use critical thinking because of this. Want to blame somebody? I’ve got a boxcar load of Republicans for you. But at this point, let’s leave it at that and focus on how to fix it. Let the cats tend to the spilt milk. There is no use in pointing fingers now. Let’s fix this.
Suggestions for fixing our school system:
Start at the 3-4-year-old level. The Head Start kids need to be fed, educated, and taught their basics thoroughly. Create standards and make sure providers are meeting those standards.
Pre-k and K kids-continue the program with good nutrition, physical activity, and basics. Most kids should know the alphabet, colors, some sight words, be hygienic, and play peacefully with others. Identify those that will need IEPs.
Grades 1-3-feed breakfasts and lunch, teach reading, computer skills, writing, math, and physical activities throughout the day (not just one 30-minute recess). If kids this age are allowed physical activity in addition to learning, they will learn much easier and faster. Example: Singing a song in a foreign language while marching around a room. Art, music, and language (either English as a second language or a foreign language such as Spanish, Japanese, or German) should be introduced.
Math concepts such as Algebra, Trigonometry, and Calculus should be introduced by 5th grade while minds still have the flexibility to deal with these concepts. Physics depends on them. Chemistry is built on all of them. Then Biochemistry and Genetics pulls from those subjects. Biology pulls from the whole thing. We have to educate our children from the ground up on this architecture that science is built upon. Science always seeks to disprove itself in order to find facts. When something can no longer be disproven by any method available, it is said to be “fact”. All machines are built using math principles. All carpentry uses angles to build a house. It is impossible to get through life without using math. But math textbooks do not use REAL LIFE PROBLEMS to show this to students. We need better textbooks and teachers who can show this to the students to get them excited about these subjects.
Critical thinking or the art of questioning ideas and suppositions is necessary for children to learn if they are to discern the sometimes hidden agendas that they will encounter in today’s world. Therefore the techniques and methods of philosophy and the humanities needs to be introduced and fostered in debate clubs and competitions at the 9th grade and above. This fosters leadership and personal growth and prepares them for roles outside of the academic setting.
This will take time, dedication, equipment, the hiring of COMPETENT personnel, and, of course, funding and lots of it. It will not be easy to do. But if handled in a stepwise fashion, with each step taking ~2-3 years to bring online, it is certainly something this great State of Georgia is capable of doing.
This fiasco wasn’t done overnight. Fixing cannot be done overnight either. I have outlined a five step plan that is most likely overly simplistic by half. But if you assume that it can be accomplished, it will take a minimum of 15 years. I am not asking for everything at once. I just want to get started.
Let’s reverse the trend to mediocrity that Kemp has been feeding us as being “great schools” that aren’t. We can do better. We must do better. Let’s elect Democrats so we can.
VOTE BLUE IN 2022. ROEVEMBER IS HERE. LET’S PROTECT OUR RIGHTS! VOTE BLUE FROM TOP TO BOTTOM!
I mean, other than being this retired older woman who has crazy ideas about how to do things, has cats, dogs, and horses, strong opinions, and does all things with a passion, just who is Ellen Wright?
I am a native of Georgia. I was born in downtown Atlanta because at the time that’s where white women went to birth babies for the most part. They brought me home to Red Oak just south of College Park. My parents had built a house there on land my grandparents had given them. So I grew up next door to my maternal grandparents, more or less. (There was a big field in between, not that it mattered much. I was always over there.)
I have never lived in the city limits in my life. I grew up riding my granddaddy’s plow mule and tractor, walking barefoot in the mud puddles, climbing trees to pick apples, falling out of the hay loft, and generally being a country kid complete with poison ivy, briar scratches, dog slobber, and horse hair. I learned NOT to try to hold something on the anvil for my grandpa (& have the scar to prove it), how to season sausage, clean chitterlings, gather eggs, milk cows, garden, can/freeze/make jelly, quilt, embroider, and sew. I’ve probably left something out, but oh, well. Growing up that way is an education all its own that no school can match.
As far as book learning, I was in the Fulton County School system when it was a good system. It might not be now but it was then. Schools became integrated when I was in high school. I don’t remember it being a problem. Maybe it was elsewhere.
I got two degrees in Biology and Chemistry (essentially a pre-med program) then turned that into a Medical Technology program at Georgia State University. Passed my exams for that and started working first for a single physician practice, then a tiny hospital in a rural city. After 25 years, I was retired.
Along the way, I met and married my husband, Tom Wright, who is also a native Georgian. He was born in Warner Robins, but was raised primarily in Manchester and LaGrange. His dad had the State Farm office on the square in downtown LaGrange for many years. Tom and all three sisters went to LaGrange High School. Tom went on to GA Tech, then the Air Force for three years, came back and finished his college education at West Georgia. He worked in his father’s office until his father’s death, moving to Dave Christie’s office afterwards. He is also retired.
We have three nephews on Tom’s side and two nieces on mine. Currently, five horses, two dachshunds, and three cats own the homestead.
I am an active CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) for Troup County. I have been involved with them since 2011. It has taught me much about the Juvenile Justice system, but I also know that I have an awful lot to learn. The field is vast and complicated, mostly by the people in it and those who touch it. Some of the laws are arcane and need to be changed. It can be incredibly slow, but it can also move with surprising speed. CASAs are charged with the responsibility of oversight of the entire process-courts, DFCS, outside agencies, parents or designated caregivers who are supposed to be doing certain activities, foster parents, schools, etc. to try to make sure these children do not “fall through the cracks”. We advocate for the child’s best interests regardless of the wishes of the parents’, the child, DFCS, or the counselors. We are independent and speak directly to the judge. It’s quite a responsibility and a very large task at times. I have only had one or two ‘failures’ and there was nothing I could have done to change the outcome. It’s heartbreaking, but the successes outnumber them.
I’ve volunteered to go overseas to work with an international faith-based medical training group that teaches the medical staff already in a region how to do more advanced medical services and provides them with the equipment and supplies to get started. My trips were to Ethiopia, but the group, Children’s Cross Connection International has done most of its work in El Salvador, Peru, and Nicaragua. It has also arranged for selected patients to come to the states for surgeries not obtainable elsewhere. I have also assisted with a few of the logistics for those.
Another volunteer group that I have worked with is Stolen Horse International. This group helps people who have had equines stolen or lost to try to locate and retrieve them. Surprising numbers of equines are stolen or lost every year and seemingly disappear into thin air. Complicating the issue is the fact that for years, the auctions were selling high numbers of horses, donkey, and mules to ‘kill buyers’ who trucked them to either Canada or Mexico to be slaughtered for their meat and hides. The trade to Canada has closed and it has gotten more difficult to Mexico, but it still exists, particularly for donkeys and mules. (China is a big importer of the hides for ‘medicinal’ uses). It is a fascinating look into a sub-culture that 99% of the people in this country have no idea exists.
If you want to know anything else, just ask. I just don’t want to run on and on.
I want to be your State Senator. I know that I can do a great job for you. I know that you will see me at more than just campaign events. The election is almost here. It is up to you to decide if you want a down-to-earth practical, straight with you kind of person who doesn’t tell you that he can solve inflation (he can’t-it’s a worldwide problem), stop violent crime (not if he’s going to put more guns on the streets, and he did), or protect women’s rights (when he voted FOR that 6 week abortion bill). You know where I stand. I’m ready to go to work.
One drop of rain really doesn’t seem like much, does it? It just evaporates off your car’s windshield and you forget it was ever there. But if you take one drop of rain after another, pretty soon you have a downpour and suddenly you can hardly see how to drive no matter how fast those wipers try to move that water away. Even more drops mean the roadways will flood, bridges will wash out, homes will be destroyed, and maybe lives lost. It all started with one drop.
Sometimes it is the accumulation of little actions in just one person’s life that need to add up to make something. Other times it is the little actions of a lot of people that are all put together to start a trend much larger than what one person can do alone. That’s why voting is so important. It is that addition factor that means that one person CAN be the difference between change or the same old thing.
Many elections have been decided on the basis of just 5-10 votes. In 2020, there really was one that was decided by a coin toss. ONE more person voting would have made the difference. (Can you imagine losing to the flip of a coin?) If you do the math, Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020 by just 3 votes per precinct in Georgia. Don’t tell me your vote doesn’t make a difference! Yes, it does!! We need every single vote. We are not just talking to hear ourselves talk.
Don’t allow anyone to keep you FROM VOTING either. It is YOUR RIGHT. If you think you are being intimidated, call the Voter Protection Hotline. If somebody is REALLY getting ugly, call 911, too. Voter Intimidation is illegal. Don’t get hurt, but don’t let them stand between you and voting. You have the right to be there.
The attempt to give you anything of value in exchange for your vote is also illegal. You cannot volunteer to vote in exchange for money or something of value. The penalty is very steep. The fine is high and the jail time is significant.
The Election Boards MUST notify you 30 days ahead of the election if your place to vote is being changed for any reason. Call 888-730-5316 if you find that it had been changed and you were not notified.
If you run into these loud-mouthed fools, drunks, and idiots, do not try to engage with them. They are what they are. Call 911 and 888-730-5316 and report what they are doing. Take videos if possible and photos of tags. If you can upload immediately, do so. (JIC somebody decides to smash a phone because you were making videos and photos, that will preserve the images.)
Stay cool. Stay calm. Vote like your future depends on it. Because it does.
For a bunch of people who are always “on it” about their Constitutional rights (but they can only tell you about maybe two of them reliably), the people behind the abortion decision really do not seem to be aware of how many ways they are violating the Constitutional Rights of ALL PEOPLE ABLE TO BEAR CHILDREN** with this galloping rush to ban a necessary healthcare procedure. Nor do they seem to care. It’s really strange. However, that may be their Achilles heel. (**Not all individual who can get pregnant are outwardly “female”. Trans men, for example, may be able to carry a pregnancy if they have not had the surgery done. )
1st Amendment rights, ironically, start with the prohibition of ANY establishment of ANY religion by the government. It’s unequivocal. Why do I say that it is irony? Because this whole thing about abortion is centered on the belief of a few that “life starts at conception” which is fundamentally a religious viewpoint and is held by a minority of only one religion (Christianity). It is not supported scientifically at all. Science maintains that nothing is “alive” until the organism is capable of sustaining itself independently of another. In mammals (humans), that would mean capable of breathing on its own. Medically, the term for this is “viability”. ( A fetus is termed “non-viable” if it would be incapable of surviving outside of the mother’s body. Generally speaking, this is before the 30th week of pregnancy. Earlier have survived, but the rates go way down very fast because the lungs may or may not be capable of exchanging oxygen efficiently for long enough to mature. )
These religious people would seem to argue that they have the “right” to express their religious viewpoint. They do. They just do not have the right to force someone else to abide by their religious beliefs. They would take umbrage if their women were forced into the wearing of the Islamic burkas for modesty. It is also a religious teaching and it is also something that is not uniformly practiced by all members of that faith. Those that do believe strongly in it are just as fervent in their stand and will (and have) fought wars about that and other issues. Mixing religious beliefs and government interference in people’s lives is a dangerous thing. Historically, it has led to the downfall of many nations, but never to the renewal or the rebirth of a democracy.
The Right of Religious Freedom INCLUDES the right not to have any religion forced upon you. It could very easily be argued that this is forcing “their” religion down the throats of millions of women across the USA who do not share their beliefs. In fact, I’d say that’s a darn good argument. I don’t want to have child marriages, female genital mutilation, wear hijab, honor killings, or have to roast myself on my husband’s funeral pyre either. My choice. Not theirs.
The 1A also prohibits the infringement of free speech, which I would argue is definitely hindered when any pregnant person who wishes to terminate a pregnancy for any reason is told that the pregnancy means loss of individual control and a mere wad of cells is running the show now. (Don’t go jumping all over me for my choice of words. A Blastocyst is exactly that. It takes a period of time before it even becomes recognizable as a zygote. So do not go there.) Then by 32 days, when maybe? a cycle is missed, a cardiac fiber twitches and these folks try to call it a heartbeat. Nope, it’s a cardiac fiber that twitches. There isn’t a defined organ there for another 32 days. No organ, no heartbeat. I know they mean well, but even with a regular thump-thump-thump, if you removed that thing from the place where it is, you could not maintain it. Why? It cannot exchange oxygen independently, i.e. breathe.
In fact, the lungs do not make the necessary surfactant that will hold the alveoli (air sacs) in the lungs open for oxygen to transfer and carbon dioxide to get out until about the 30-32 week of the pregnancy. That’s when the doctors will call the fetus “viable”, i.e. capable of living independently on its own. Unless and until it can breathe on its own, it isn’t technically a separate organism. It is part of the woman’s body and she has control. That’s not just my opinion. It is established Judaic and Islamic law and has been for centuries. It mostly was in Christian countries until the discovery of DNA and microscopy capable of visualizing the individual cells and the process of fertilization. Then, oh, me, oh, my, suddenly this was a “thing”.
What it REALLY is, and the supporters of this are going to have a flock of ducks, is a cold-blooded usage of both the scientific images to manipulate a gullible and malleable religious sector to gain control over an entire sector of the population, i.e. women in general, and put them in a status of being A. in a lower economic condition because they cannot command the wages and salaries of their male counterparts, B. their education will often be curtailed or abandoned due to the demands of pregnancy, child care, and lowered economic levels, C. keep them out of the higher levels of business due to the demands of finding and keeping child care and schools, D. and quite likely at some point, removing their right to vote at all. At that point, women would have the same value to society as livestock. As much respect as I have for the sentient animals, I am not livestock.
Unlike livestock, each woman has a CHOICE over whether or not she even WANTS to reproduce. (Of course, I ran into the people who just ‘assumed’ that I would just as soon as I married, or even if I didn’t, that we would adopt. Honestly, as much as I love some of these people, it’s a personal decision and none of your freaking business. In many instances, your nosiness is occasion for much hurt and tears. Keep your nose out. If it happens, celebrate. If it doesn’t, do not ask why. Things happen and your poking the wound won’t help.) Trying to FORCE women to get pregnant AND FORCE them to deliver fetuses that may be deformed, have major genetic disorders, be stillborn, live only a very short time in extreme pain, have some or all of their organs outside of the body, or other major problems ispsychic torture on the mother and family and the medical staff not to mention extraordinarily expensive for no discernable reason other than “it was God’s will”. Excuse me?
Ecclesiasticus 38:1
“Honour a physician with the honour due unto him for the uses which ye may have of him: for the Lord hath created him.”
King James Version (KJV)
Please note: this is from the Apocrypha which is that part of the Scriptures included in the Roman Catholic version of the Bible, but not the Protestant version. It’s just as valid. It just isn’t read as often.
Now exactly WHY a bunch of MEN with nearly zero knowledge of female anatomy and close to that of reproduction (including their own) want to pass MORE laws and tie MORE regulations around 50% of the population when they swear they want a SMALLER government is simply illogical. That is, unless they want a fascist style patriarchal autocratic society. I’m not interested in living in Russia, North Korea, Afghanistan, or Hitler’s Germany. So they can stuff it.
Women need to decide what is best for their own bodies and their own lives. Not a man. At least not until they start having cramps, using tampons, having endometriosis, labor pains, fibroids, gestational diabetes, and all the rest. Then the WOMEN can take a vote on it.
Vote for the party that supports PRO-CHOICE for your life. Vote BLUE IN NOVEMBER 2022. SHARE and LIKE to your family and friends. Contribute to campaigns during this last push.
Love between two people is a peculiar emotion. It grows with every passing day, and it changes as time goes by. It can arrive slowly or, BAM, full-fledged. Sometimes it can die if not tended. But if worked on diligently, it can last a lifetime and beyond.
What is also peculiar about it is that some people, for religious reasons, choose to make it their business to opine on the ‘appropriateness’ of the love of any particular set of two people who wish to formalize their love with a marriage ceremony. Where they get the notion that they have the right to deny the CONSTITUTIONAL Right to the Pursuit of Happiness, the Right to Freedom from Religious Persecution, the Right of Personal Privacy, and the Right to Freedom of Speech I have no idea. But they do.
Somewhere along the line, they got the idea that they were the “Moral Majority” which is, if nothing, a farce. They are not. What they are is the “Minority Morals Gestapo” and, boy, are they taking THAT seriously! Their noses are in everybody’s private business, in their bedrooms, bathrooms, and even in their underwear. Then they loudly and self-righteously proclaim to the media and to lawmakers that “everyone” (which it isn’t but they claim it is) knows that….. and agrees that…..” about something that they really don’t know a handful of blackeyed peas about. Same sex marriages is a great case in point,
According to them, “marriage is between one man and one woman.” Really? Who said? That is basically a religious construct and not even all religions. Some religions allow polygamy and it can be either way. The Hindus even have a god of divorce. There are a couple of societies in Africa and Asia that are matriarchal and a woman will take 3-5 husbands. The ancient Greeks celebrated same sex marriages and thought the gods of Olympus had really honored them. The First Peoples of the North American continent frequently had threesomes (never know when you’ll need a spare?). So this hardline stance is patently bizarre. It’s not biblical, historical, or even sociological. It’s just bone-headed and based on something somebody dreamed up in Sunday School (and don’t get me started on that.)
This is another reason why we need the Marriage Equality Act passed and signed into law ASAP. We need to protect this right by codifying this so these people cannot remove this right from these people.
Please write and call your Senators and Congressional Representative and tell me you support this measure. SHARE and Like this post.
VOTE BLUE IN NOVEMBER so we can have as many Democrats in the seats of leadership as possible. We need your support and help to make this happen.
Medicine was always my first love/passion. I adored learning about how the body worked, and what happened when it did not. This, however, was much to my mother’s dismay because I would rattle on about something I had just observed, read, or seen at the supper table which she found to be unsettling or “gross” and highly inappropriate for her daughter to be discussing probably at all, but certainly not at the table. She never quite got used to this tomboy daughter of hers.
I did wind up in medicine although not as the large animal vet that I had envisioned growing up. (Didn’t have the grades for that.) I became a Medical Technologist and subsequently a Laboratory Manager. I’ve worked for large urban hospitals, small town hospitals, one itty bitty rural hospital, and several physician practices. It’s all been challenging and educational. No two places are exactly the same, but they all share a lot of things in common.
Things they share:
They all operate on the brink of disaster, and no, they are not kidding. It sounds like a lot of money coming into the place when you get your invoices, but they have tremendous amounts going out, too. Astounding what it costs to run a business in healthcare.
Personnel costs are their main issue. I’m not talking about the physicians, per se, because as a rule, they bill out separately. I’m talking primarily nursing staff, but also the “ancillary staff” (pulmonary techs, radiology techs, laboratory, physical therapy, occupational therapy, social workers, various patient advocates, chaplains, psych workers if they have them, etc.), facility staff (housekeeping, maintenance, security, kitchen, laundry, materials and purchasing) as well as administrative (C-suite, financial, admissions, medical records, human resources, etc.) For each patient bed, there are anywhere from 20 to 150 people working to keep the place open and functioning. It’s an army. And it runs 24/7/365.
Ever since Medicare, and later Medicaid, came into being, the reimbursements have been steadily DECREASING. That means less money coming in for those patients. Here’s the catch with that: PRIVATE insurance bases their reimbursements on whatever Medicare is doing. So if Medicare reduces their reimbursement from say $15 to $12.50, they will, too. Here’s another catch: MediCAID never pays as much as MediCARE does. So if they’re paying $12.50, they will only pay $10. (I’m making these figures up. Don’t think they are real.)
Because of the steadily shrinking reimbursement rates, hospitals started shrinking the number of beds they maintained. For example, one of the hospitals I worked in closed down an entire floor of beds. That meant they could reduce expensive nursing staff all the way down to the janitors. Nobody seemed to miss the bed numbers. Then it merged with another hospital. That merger meant that a new building was built, but the number of beds total of the two shrank yet again. Nobody noticed. Until the pandemic hit. Then the entire county woke up and wondered where nearly 300 beds had gone. I’ll tell you where they went. Reimbursement cut backs and they are not coming back.
This is the hard economic truth of Kemp’s policy of not expanding Medicaid to very low income people. If they do not have the means to pay the high cost of healthcare, then they have to resort to staying home and “making do” on their own. Their chances of dying go way up. The hospitals simply cannot AFFORD to offer care to that many people who cannot pay their bills. There is some money for ‘indigent’ care, but it usually runs out by June. After that, the hospitals and doctors provide care out of their own pockets. Sooner or later, those pockets are emptied out.
Kemp seems to think that the healthcare system has bottomless resources. It doesn’t.
Kemp is a very wealthy man who doesn’t worry about how to pay his bills. But these people do, and they need to have hospitals there to take care of them. Does he care at all? Certainly doesn’t seem to. Stacey Abrams does.
Medicaid money is already available. All he would have to do is sign the paperwork. It is MILLIONS of dollars and would bring new jobs to Georgia as well as save rural hospitals. Why won’t Kemp do it? Hard-hearted? Doesn’t care? Maybe even cruel? He certainly doesn’t have Georgia’s interest at heart.
I want Wellstar West Georgia Medical Center to remain open and serving the people of west Georgia. I want the hospitals in Columbus to continue to operate. But most of all, I want the hospitals in Warm Springs to continue to offer community service and to be able to upgrade their abilities. Rehabilitation is a tremendous asset to all in this area. But so is the ability to provide urgent medical attention.
People have died on the way PAST closed hospitals. That’s an unfortunate fact. EMS services can only do so much. We need Medicaid expanded in Georgia.
We need rural healthcare addressed in an urgent fashion.
We need a governor who actually cares about Georgia’s poor people. And it is not Brainless Kemp. It’s Stacey Abrams.
And we need to give her a General Assembly who will work WITH her not against her. Vote Blue in 2022 and help elect me and others to more responsible leadership.
This is the theory that says that the elected officials “know best for the voters” and the voters don’t need to know what is going on until the legislation is signed into law when it is too late for them to protest or influence the course of events. Well, maybe I’m nuttier than a trainload of Claxton fruitcakes, but I have never thought much of that idea. Elected officials are supposed to be servants of the people, not the other way around. My thoughts are bound to chafe some folks like beach sand in their swim trunks but they’ll just have to live with it. I’m like that. 
There is no use in pointing fingers now. Let’s fix this. 
